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In a near-future Toronto, five people in a pharmaceutical startup, including the married couple Lyda and Mikaela, invent a drug meant to treat schizophrenia. Instead, small doses give you the feeling of being in touch with a loving God. Large doses give you a permanent hallucination of some kind of divine being and the emotional conviction that it's real, even if you logically understand that it's just a hallucination. A very bad night at the startup leaves one founder jailed for murder, one a recluse, Mikaela dead, and her wife Lyda in a mental hospital with a hallucinatory guardian angel.
Years later, the story begins. Lyda, still in the hospital, learns that a new drug that makes you experience God has hit the streets. Horrified at the thought that the drug that killed her wife and ruined her life is getting released into the world, she extracts herself from the hospital and goes on a quest to find its source and stop it.
Lyda is accompanied by a friend she met at the hospital and rescued from a guy who thought he was a hyena (it's a long story) and a sometime lover she also met at the hospital, a former CIA agent who used a drug that helps you see patterns in large masses of information, which made her permanently paranoid. And of course Doctor Gloria, her very own imaginary angel, is always with her. And so begins a madcap quest involving smart drugs, a hit man with a ranch of miniature bison in his living room, criminals and drug dealers of assorted cultures and class levels, ex-gangster priests, and a whole lot of Gods.
This is the sort of book I normally don't like. It's extremely gonzo, and it hits three of my least favorite book tropes: God, psychedelic drugs, and drugs that make you experience God. (These aren't squicks, they're just elements that are very commonly written in a boring and/or facile manner.) However, I loved Gregory's Revelator and really liked We Are All Completely Fine, so I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
Gregory's wife is a therapist, and you can tell. Despite the weird events, wacky tone, and near-future setting, there's a baseline of realism about things like how mental hospitals function, what it's like to have a mental illness or be addicted to drugs, and how psychiatric medication works. Even the original intent of the drug and how it ended up makes sense.
Lyda is angry, prickly, and fires off hostile wisecracks to avoid painful emotional entanglements; she's not conventionally likable, but I liked her a lot. Doctor Gloria is a great character, and the question of whether the God drug might be causing or enabling something real ended up being a lot more complex and interesting than I expected. There's also a character who appears late, a girl with imaginary friends who I absolutely loved. The characters all have their own lives and motivations, even the minor ones and the hallucinatory ones, which makes the world feel very lived-in
Content notes: Non-graphic death of miniature bison (BOO, I loved the teeny living room bison), non-graphic allusions to child abuse, violence, torture, SO MANY DRUGS, atheist rants, religious rants, and a multiracial/multi-sexual orientation cast in which basically everyone is a criminal or drug dealer or addict or mentally ill or some combination of the above.
Years later, the story begins. Lyda, still in the hospital, learns that a new drug that makes you experience God has hit the streets. Horrified at the thought that the drug that killed her wife and ruined her life is getting released into the world, she extracts herself from the hospital and goes on a quest to find its source and stop it.
Lyda is accompanied by a friend she met at the hospital and rescued from a guy who thought he was a hyena (it's a long story) and a sometime lover she also met at the hospital, a former CIA agent who used a drug that helps you see patterns in large masses of information, which made her permanently paranoid. And of course Doctor Gloria, her very own imaginary angel, is always with her. And so begins a madcap quest involving smart drugs, a hit man with a ranch of miniature bison in his living room, criminals and drug dealers of assorted cultures and class levels, ex-gangster priests, and a whole lot of Gods.
This is the sort of book I normally don't like. It's extremely gonzo, and it hits three of my least favorite book tropes: God, psychedelic drugs, and drugs that make you experience God. (These aren't squicks, they're just elements that are very commonly written in a boring and/or facile manner.) However, I loved Gregory's Revelator and really liked We Are All Completely Fine, so I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
Gregory's wife is a therapist, and you can tell. Despite the weird events, wacky tone, and near-future setting, there's a baseline of realism about things like how mental hospitals function, what it's like to have a mental illness or be addicted to drugs, and how psychiatric medication works. Even the original intent of the drug and how it ended up makes sense.
Lyda is angry, prickly, and fires off hostile wisecracks to avoid painful emotional entanglements; she's not conventionally likable, but I liked her a lot. Doctor Gloria is a great character, and the question of whether the God drug might be causing or enabling something real ended up being a lot more complex and interesting than I expected. There's also a character who appears late, a girl with imaginary friends who I absolutely loved. The characters all have their own lives and motivations, even the minor ones and the hallucinatory ones, which makes the world feel very lived-in
Content notes: Non-graphic death of miniature bison (BOO, I loved the teeny living room bison), non-graphic allusions to child abuse, violence, torture, SO MANY DRUGS, atheist rants, religious rants, and a multiracial/multi-sexual orientation cast in which basically everyone is a criminal or drug dealer or addict or mentally ill or some combination of the above.
