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NORMAL
by Warren Ellis
FSG Originals, December 2016
148 pages
$13.00
ISBN: 0374534977


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

There seems to be a bumper crop of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction about these days, too many of which are rather alarmingly large. So it is a pleasure to come across a novella-length tale set in the near future that manages to combine a modest locked-room mystery with a view of the near future that is quite terrifying without being gratuitously detailed.

Adam Dearden, by profession a futurist, that is, one who contemplates the present and extrapolates probable futures for the benefit of governments and corporations, has fetched up in a facility called Normal Head, a refuge for futurists who have been driven to depression or madness by what they have been thinking about. The isolated Normal Head, in the centre of an experimental forest in Oregon, is billed as a centre that is devoted to rehabilitation, but no one seems really ever to be well enough to leave.

Adam is happy to have been involuntarily relocated from Rotterdam where he had finally succumbed to a serious case of "abyss gaze," the Nietzschean complaint occurring when the depths are contemplated for too long. But it had all started in Namibia where something so terrible had happened to Adam that he cannot describe it and tends to break down in tears when the memory of the event threatens to come to consciousness.

Adam is not at Normal Head for long before he becomes aware of another mystery. A fellow inmate, has disappeared and when his room is entered, his bed is found occupied by a vast swarm of bugs. This is the locked room mystery and when it is solved Adam and the reader are both appalled.

NORMAL is a brisk read and, for the most part, a charming one. The various patients at Normal Head are intriguing in their individual insanities and the central question (which I expect can be posed as "what is Normal, anyway?) is not easily resolved. Witty, perverse, and ultimately disturbing - what more do want from under 150 pages? Read it.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2017

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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