Subdivision
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A heady, inventive, fantastical novel about the nature of memory and the difficulty of confronting trauma
An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse’s owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life.
Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a series of darkly comic encounters reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels. A lovelorn truck driver . . . a mysterious child . . . a watchful crow. A cryptic birthday party. A baffling physics experiment in a defunct office tower where some calamity once happened. Through it all, the narrator is tempted and manipulated by the bakemono, a shape-shifting demon who poses a distinctly terrifying danger.
Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, Subdivision is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called “a master of the dark arts.” With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to readers of Broken River, J. Robert Lennon continues his exploration of the mysteries of perception and memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Lennon's deliriously inventive novel (published simultaneously with the collection Let Me Think), a woman suffers from a bout of amnesia while staying in a strange town known only as the Subdivision. The unnamed narrator doesn't know how she came to be the houseguest of kind if eccentric retirees Clara and the Judge, and, unable to remember her name or why she is here, she sets out to create a new life, accompanied by her digital assistant, Cylvia. But things in the Subdivision aren't as they appear. Strangers are alternatively too familiar or too hostile; the ruins of a church feature scenes of biblical pageantry acted out behind stained glass; empty properties host "probability wells" that warp time; and perhaps most distressingly, her steps are haunted by the "bakemono," a shape-shifting, malevolent spirit intent on seducing her. Lennon strikes a delicate balance, and the surreal story is only occasionally weighed down with overwriting. As the narrator dives deeper into the Subdivision, its true nature comes into focus, but with an apocalyptic storm on the horizon, can she complete her journey of self-discovery in time? This is an impressive marriage of a vibrant, tortuous fever dream and an unsentimental meditation on life and death.
