Joshua Mohr’s sixth novel, Farsickness, is a work of dislocation. “There is a new voice in my head who won’t stop screaming,” it begins. That voice, the narrator wants us to understand, is not his internal monologue but rather an entity unto itself, “a bully, greedy with how he blocks the normal transmissions in my brain.” It’s tempting to read this as allegorical, metaphorical. Much of the book, after all, takes place in an imagined landscape: Dalloway Castle, which on the surface appears to be a double-wide trailer sitting in an otherwise empty Scottish valley.
If you’ve read Mohr, you’ll recognize the method: to externalize the interior, to make physical the terrain of the psyche, the trauma of the soul. With both the novels and his nonfiction, Sirens (2017) and Model Citizen (2021), he pushes back against our preconceptions, not just stylistically but also in regard to how we expect such narratives will flow. In his 2009 debut, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, a man named Rhonda goes through a portal in a Bay Area dumpster on a journey to find himself. Damascus (2011) unfolds in a dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission district in 2003, during the Iraq War. Violence threads these books as a fact of life. As Hal, the narrator of Farsickness, observes, “it gets mad and electric in my mind.”
At 122 pages, Farsickness is a very short novel. It’s also very good. Hal may be in thrall to the voice in his head, but he is an acute witness, and Mohr deftly toggles between these parallel registers. His narrator lives in the world in which we do: he flies to Scotland on a jet, going through TSA screening and renting a car. Once he enters the double-wide, however, he discovers a complex of rooms and tunnels that leads to “an underground body of water”—a zone defined by the subconscious, in which a creature known as the Lacerated Queen must, at regular intervals, eat hand grenades to blow off her own head so it can regenerate.
“It’s such a tragedy,” she says, “that humans will never know how good it feels to explode.”
Hal—“They named me after the computer from that Kubrick movie, 2001,” he informs us—has a recognizable backstory. He served as a U.S. Army tunnel rat in Afghanistan, “clearing caves. Fighting in the dark.” He has a wife and a son, although he no longer lives with them. He was a SWAT team sniper until a hostage situation went sideways. He can’t quite piece it all together because the voice is occluding his memory, “the information immediately melting, sliding off my brain like butter from corn on the cob.”
That’s a vivid image, one of many throughout the book, and it highlights a particular strength of Farsickness, which is its language. To take us into a realm beyond the ordinary, Mohr understands, requires specificity. Again and again, Hal gets into outrageous, otherworldly situations—threatened by an enormous bat named Boris, “like a huge hairy Venus flytrap”; beset by an army of Hals who look exactly like him and “will do whatever it takes. They’ll tear down this whole place, so they never remember.” The sharpness of the sentences is what makes the details resonate. Adding to the atmosphere are the illustrations by the author’s daughter, Ava, which have an evocative and edgy feel.
And why not? At the heart of Farsickness is Hal’s longing for his child, the desire to be with him again. Family as throughline, as it were. Yet equally essential is the necessity of recollection, of facing oneself down. As the novel builds to its final conflict, in a castle built of bone and skulls, we begin to realize that we are now in Chapel Perilous, a setting first evoked by Sir Thomas Malory in the 15th century and redefined in the 1970s by Robert Anton Wilson, whose Cosmic Trigger frames it as a crucible, where we must accept that reality is mutable if we are to come to terms with what it means to be alive.
The trick, of course, is that only in this elusive middle ground can we find redemption, which is the purpose of Hal’s quest. He is desperate not to give in to forgetting, even if to remember means to be in pain. As Farsickness progresses, he begins to rediscover who he is, even as he fights an existential battle on the shores of a subterranean lake that may or may not exist in any other world. It’s not a pretty picture, but what can he do? Redemption, after all—or so the novel insists—resides in remembering, in confronting our pasts, our histories. “It’s fine if you don’t know,” the narrator tells the other Hals. “I remember enough for all of us.” He knows they cannot hear him, but he has no choice but to persevere.•
