My Name is Sheol (Coming soon!)
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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.
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.
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Instead of sympathy Che finds herself medicated and that is only the beginning of her woes. She eventually finds herself up hard up against the involuntary aspect of the mental health system, adrift in a place which neither caters to her needs nor respects any part of the human experience seriously if that does not comport with the narrow outlook of hard scientific materialism.
Release Date
The book is nearing completion and will be released around Christmas 2025. The PDF above gives a little taster of the tone and the style but all of those are subject to change.
Queries have been made as to whether there book is firmly anti-psychiatry. The answer is no, but it does make some trenchant criticisms of the way that psychiatry is practiced in the west. It does steer 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.
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The book does sit firmly within the New Scripture genre, and although as a first person narration it cannot be as Hypnogogic as my other works it definitely uses some of the techniques of Hyp Prose.