A conundrum: Felix, a patient at the Menlo Tuberculosis Sanatorium, has collapsed on the garden path after a particularly violent fit of expectoration. Lying there "scrunched up ass up" with his knees tucked inward and his bloody, drooly face smushed into the pavement, he thinks to himself he must look something like a snail.
      This is the beginning of Jace Brittain's zany, rollicking, transgressive novel, Sorcererer (Schism Neuronics, 2022). In prose scintillating with wordplay, sonic pyrotechnics, enciphered messages, and slant rhymes, Sorcererer traces the spiraling associations of Felix's mind as he lies immobilized on the sanatorium path, where he may or may not be transforming into a snail. Brittain's novel is a dazzling, dexterous one, expertly fusing dark humor, slapstick comedy, and laugh-out-loud puns, while simultaneously pulsing with a tenderness and a sincerity that make its twisty, slimy corridors feel unexpectedly cozy. For all its subversions and disorientations, it's a text you somehow want to curl up inside of, like a snail into its shell.
      There are many adjectives I want to use to describe Sorcererer: riotous, enigmatic, cheeky, labyrinthine, mischievous, arcane, folksy, unruly, sweet, strange. But the adjective that describes it best of all is undoubtedly gooey. The text positively drips—with snail slime, mucus, phlegm, ink, algae, ocean spume, blood, semen, ropes of spittle, and animal entrails. Lying next to Felix on the path is his "expectoratus," the glob of blackish blood he's just coughed up. This glob becomes a character itself, inching back and forth along the path in its own snailish approximation. Snails are on Felix's mind because they've recently been on his body: as part of a "desperate and failed cure" for his disease, the sanatorium staff placed snails on his bare chest, where they left behind trails of slime that appeared to Felix like characters in a runic alphabet.
      These slimy runes are an apt metaphor for the book, whose text is sonically, visually, and metaphorically goopy: words slip and slide playfully into other words, ink clots and bleeds in a series of blotchy palimpsests, and the mucilaginous prose conjures a world in which goo becomes a force for resistance. The Menlo Sanatorium is located in Los Angeles, and Felix and his fellow patients have been sent there, like thousands of TB patients in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in the belief that the dry, clean Western climate would support their convalescence: "can't breathe they ask rest this way, a bit of adventure and blue sky. The promised land every tenth eleventh and twelfth word out of their mouths respectively." Or, as the dictatorial sanatorium staff intone more succinctly: ""HEALTH IS CLEAN." Brittain, however, unravels these and other tropes of the West, reminding readers that such frontier-building mythologies were "painful no fatal realities for some." While the rules at the Barlow Sanitorium, on which Menlo is based, dictated that "Patients must not expectorate anywhere except in cups provided for that purpose," in Sorcererer, expectorations are unleashed every which way, oozing and gooping across the mythologized landscapes of the West. Viscosity thus becomes a metaphor for resistance to institutionalized power, that of both the Menlo Sanatorium and the nation as a whole.
     A central example of this can be found in one of the book's major subplots, which takes place in the sanatorium's Borgesian library. Felix and his dear friend and fellow patient Oswalda zu K have been using the library books to send encrypted messages to each other: they leave "codes guttered or in circled or ciphered letters in the books which they loved." Many of the pages in these books are blackened with dried expectorate, out of which, sometimes "a word will seem to rise from that dark and dry sea the ridges of the characters surfacing in the right light." In such gooey environs, communication can indeed become difficult; at times, expectorations literally interfere with characters' ability to speak, as they must pause mid-sentence to expel the "dark scarletting bubbling" sputum. But for Brittain, the illegibility which Sorcererer's gooey aesthetic produces is not a cause for concern; rather, it opens up space for play, in a Barthesian sense. Thus gooped up, language undergoes a series of mutations, playful translations and unorthodox rhymes. It's in the gaps between each oozy iteration of a word that Sorcererer's antics take place.
     This is not to say that Sorcererer ignores the darker side of goo: there's a constant attention to abject physicality, to secretions and excretions, that tips more than once from slapstick humor into body horror. Felix vomits; he farts; he experiences an inconvenient ejaculation. These bodily functions, paired with references to infectious disease, cannibalism, carrion flowers, gut flora, and Thomas Browne's Urn Burial, bring to mind goo-as-putrefaction. The rotting corpse is a presence constantly lurking at the margins of Sorcererer's pages: "Heavens me the indignity along the way to returning to the big damn nothing," thinks Felix. We are sacks of goo, the book seems to say. Having a body is a messy business.
     But the other thing about goo, about slime, about ooze, is that it cannot remain isolated. It is not a discrete object with clearly defined borders; it gets into everything. While this fact produces mess, it also enables intimacy. Brittain describes the "accidentally neighborly exchange of… cloudy molecules" that occurs between Felix and Oswalda (whose friendship is a truly heartwarming one, a welcome source of solace inside the oppressive sanatorium walls). The borders between the two friends literally blur, as do the borders between Felix and the snails fused to his chest, the bacteria dwelling in his lungs, and the expectorated phlegm that keeps him company on the path. Contamination can be a frightening thing—it certainly scares the sanatorium staff—but it can also prompt a realization: none of us is alone. Hybridity is not just an artistic movement; it is a fact of being.
     Ultimately, Sorcererer is a love story—an ode to language, friendship, and the link between the two. It's a book to savor, to read out loud, to muck and splash about in. So savor it. Swallow it. Let its insides become your insides, and see what comes bubbling up.