My Name is Sheol​​
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My Name is Sheol is a work of literary psychological fiction that explores the fragile boundary between inner experience and consensus reality.
We first meet Che as she sits in a psychiatrist's office, having been brought there by her concerned mother who is desperate for her daughter's strangeness to be stopped.
Che does her best to explain the intensity of her lucid dreams - and the reality of the dream-lover whom she goes out to meet - but she finds little comprehension or understanding.
What she encounters instead is clinical dismissal: her dreams are reinterpreted as symptoms and her experiences are reduced, medicated, and dismissed.
Che’s is eventually drawn into the involuntary side of the mental health system—a reductionist world governed by hard scientific materialism and medical certainty.
As her experiences are invalidated Che narrates her story with alternating clarity and doubt, until the increasing strangeness of her experience brings her to a tipping point of between despair and redemption.
My Name is Sheol is a mind bending trip through the far reaches of mental illness and the lurid intensity of lucid dreaming. It maps out the architectonics of humane experience in these hyperrealities in a way that threatens tears such landscapes apart.
This novel works as an inquiry into mental illness, perception, and authority. Is Che unwell? Misunderstood? Or is she experiencing something that existing mental health frameworks cannot comprehend? The narrative remains open enough to admit supernatural possibilities while at the same time blanketing that in the unstable landscape of dreams.
Written in a restrained and lucid style, My Name is Sheol is an introspective novel rooted in interior life, societal exile, the tragedies of human love and the consequences of loving recklessly. It will appeal to readers of literary fiction who are drawn to psychological intensity, unreliable narration, and novels that treat interior experience with gravity and care.
Queries have been made as to whether the book is anti-psychiatry. The answer is no, but it does offer a stark critique of the way that psychiatry is practiced in the west, steering close to the the point made by the late (and very great) Terence McKenna:
We have no tradition of shamanism. We have no tradition of journeying into these mental worlds. We are terrified of madness because the Western mind is a house of cards, and the people who built it know that -
Imagine if you were slightly odd and the solution was to take you and lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad. That would drive anyone mad. If you have ever been in a madhouse you know that it is an environment calculated to make you crazy and to keep you crazy.
Although the book sits squarely within the New Scripture genre, as a first-person realist narration it cannot be as Hypnogogic my other works in the genre.
