CHATTERHAT

A man with an unusual past seeks to solve an offbeat mystery in Ingwalson’s comic novel.

Boblives in Aspenroot,a Rocky Mountain city that’s now the largest urban area in the world, a destination for dreamers and schemers of all sorts. Bob is afraid that his fellow Aspenroot residents don’t like him—including his neighbors, strangers on the bus, and his co-workers at Moo Cow Farms Milk Delivery, where he works as a delivery driver. He decides to throw a party to get to know the people in his neighborhood, and at that get-together, he hears an incredible story from a man who survived the city’s infamous holiday office-party massacre: “Slaughterhouse Aspenroot,” narrates the survivor, a born storyteller. “The Great American Abattoir. Let the devil take the hindmost and a fire eat the rest. One door in, no way out. Forty-six of the forty-eight employees of SuperMeme/Aspenroot and a half-dozen caterers (and the like) punched bloody.” However, a few elements of the tale don’t sit right with Bob, who knows a thing or two about lies, guns, and crime. It starts him off on a quest to uncover a mysterious figure who maybe only exists in his mind but who’s at the heart of the American West: Chatterhat. Ingwalson’s prose is energetic but understated, distracting the reader with low-key digressions and asides only to surprise them with surreal imagery, as when Bob listens to a neighbor’s gossip about people Bob doesn’t know: “ ‘The other day, the Suppervilles, you know them right?’ I make a noncommittal shrug, like who doesn’t know the Suppervilles, right? ‘Yeah, right, there was that whole wife-swapping party rumor? Them. But so they lost their cat the other day.’ ” The novel’s mix of the absurd and the mundane will remind readers of the work of Sam Lipsyte and George Saunders, but Ingwalson manages to strike a hypnotic rhythm of his own. It’s a weird and rambling tale—the kind you hear at a party and don’t fully believe but might find yourself thinking about months and years later.

A delightful, twisty story about storytelling.