TEARS OF FIRE

An amnesiac man trapped in a brutal landscape of ruin, fire, monsters, and marauders undergoes numerous torments, learning that this nightmarish place is a literal reflection of his own mind.

Patrick’s SF/fantasy debut opens with a nameless, amnesiac protagonist trapped in a hellscape out of Hieronymus Bosch. Human civilization lies in wreckage amid rivers of fire and magma. Barbarians astride giant lizards spread pain and destruction, while all fear the regular, boiling rain that falls from the sky and the strangely sentient green mists that seem to hunt prey with their lightninglike energy bolts. The hero—ultimately called Joseph Morris—has technical expertise and strives to build a “machine” allowing him to escape, but the knowledge and clarity seem to elude him. He is told a way has been prepared by his parents, and the cryptic sage Dr. Alarius Vango is among his allies. Ending the first act is the revelation that Morris was a youth diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder who was institutionalized prior to a semistable adulthood working in IT. This awful setting is in his own mind, and much of the vivid dystopian/fantasy narrative is metaphorical of mental illness (a nepenthe-esque water, an analog to psychotropic drugs, gives Morris temporary relief from the agony but brings on lassitude and weight gain). There is also a strong infusion of ancient Gnostic philosophy, in that while entombed alive in his terrible, devastated inner world, Roman Catholic–born Morris is practically a god, but a fallen, feckless one, helpless and distant from the real God. A late revelation that Morris has entered his own mind in a radical gambit to help rescue his similarly stricken sister makes this engaging fabulist material weirdly akin to Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. Fans drawn to Stephen King’s Dark Tower cycle will probably be more in tune with the prose than readers with Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden prominent on their shelves. Patrick has himself wrestled with mental illness and explains that he wrote this novel as his creative alternative to a straightforward sickness/recovery memoir.

An engrossing, apocalyptic fantasy/SF tale that renders mental illness from an insider’s perspective.