Bad Brains

This book was highly recommended to me and I have to say that I loved it. It kind of came as a surprise despite the high praise because I don't read a lot of horror; outside of the classics I've found a lot of horror books to be pulpy and one-dimensional, often they're so focused on the blood-and-guts that they ignore important narrative elements and come out formulaic. That is not the case for Bad Brains and I am going to gush about this book. I don't want people to think I am an easy grader either, my October TBR just happened to be stacked with killer books and this was the pièce de résistance. If I am guilty of anything it's loving books with unreliable narrators and maybe I am criminally attracted to anything with a beat or post-beat influence (maybe that's all a fancy English education is good for).Bad Brains is about Austen, an artist in the middle of a depressed slump. His art won't sell and his wife has left him. Instead of painting, he's working at a T-shirt shop and drinking himself into a stupor. One day his friend who curates an art gallery invites him to a party and tells him to grab some beers. On his way out of a 7-11, as he apes at the cashier, he takes a serious fall and wakes up in the hospital. Austen suffers from extreme chain seizures during his extended stay at the hospital and begins to see a horrible liquid silver monster thing on the edges of his vision. He is eventually released from the hospital with a clean bill of health, there is nothing physically wrong with him but he is still suffering from hallucinations and seizures. He seeks out help from a number of doctors but is too scared to tell them about the silver for fear of being labeled crazy. Turned away by all, he seeks out his mother who lives states away. While visiting meets a man named Russel who claims to know what's wrong with him as his father also had epileptic visions; the two of them seek out the answer as they travel across the country.The silver thing, itself a whorl, did not seem to care or notice; but that was because it was a creature of dream, an insubstantiality. Occasionally, in his less epileptic moments, Austen wondered if he should be frightened by it, frightened at least by the sheer number of its visitations; only his brain understood the secret omnipresence of that scaly mercury dance, and his brain was no true witness anymore. Which was maybe the most frightening thing of all.Clench. That's what it's like to read Bad Brains; you are physically clenched for the entirety of this book as you try to piece together what is going on. From the moment that Austen wakes up in the hospital you as the reader are right there with him, experiencing viscerally his struggle with his situation. I'm not doing it justice just by describing it, but watching Austen as he is consumed in an abyss of despair and fear of his condition, reading the descriptions of his pain and his longing for his ex-wife as he lays bound and alone in a hospital bed are some of the most moving things I've ever read in fiction, let alone in horror. This book is unique in its use of horror elements to progress the story, it delivers these powerfully moving, empathetic, and visceral passages that couldn't really exist outside of the genre. It's tempting to say that this book is good in spite of its genre, but that's not true, it uses its horror elements as unique tools to tell a story that couldn't really be told otherwise.I am standing here seeing this, I am seeing it and took off the top of its skull where the brain is and inside, the most delicate writhe, each lobe filigreed, threaded and girdled with silvery death in all its masques and manifestations, in all its irrevocable forms: the elegant pulse of an aneurysm, an extravagant clutch of tumors concealed like an oyster's pearl, clots like molded caviar and each molecule burning, shining silver light on the bone chips ragged and blood like the swirled center of a dubious treat; and nestled in the rich middle like eggs in a nest, eyes. Exquisite and long and barely there.I think that this book has some of the best prose that I have ever read, I am in no way understating it when I call Koja a master of the craft. There is a unique and intoxicating blend of lyricism and gritty realism that pervades this whole book. This is a stark and grimy read. Much of this book takes place in parking lots, gas station bathrooms, and seedy motels; we spend our time floating across this dark and desolate world locked behind Austen's eyes, seeing this disjointed world as he sees it. Koja perfectly describes an intensely claustrophobic, visceral, and emotionally charged journey across the urban wastes. Her descriptions are desolate and empathetic, beautiful in their grotesquery and dissymmetry. This book pushes the boundaries of conventional narrative structure and the prose is a powerful force, drawing readers into the gritty and tumultuous world she has created.I can safely shelve this as a favorite, and I already picked up a copy of her first book [b:The Cipher 341930 The Cipher Kathe Koja https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1566122945l/341930.SY75.jpg 332292]. I wish more horror was like this, where the “horror” is used in some way to progress a larger narrative. Part of what made it work has to be how relatable the entire scenario is, we could all just as easily take a fall and see devils in the shadows. Maybe it's the unique appeal of internal horror, the “it's coming from inside the house” type of dread that really made this click for me. Another thought I kept having was how nice it would have been if this were given an illustrated edition, A big part of this book is Austen's art and I would love to see a rendition of the amazing visual descriptions that litter this thing. All in all, I am glad that dipping my toe back into the genre turned out so spectacular.TL;DR: Imagine getting sick and being told that the way you are is the way you're going to be forever. That's the most horrible thing of all.