GUS.

A man experiences strange visions in his new town in this horror yarn from Garden.

Joel, a 30-something tech, has to move from the city to a small town for his job. He’s pleased to learn that the cost of living will be lower in his new home, but he’s irked when he arrives on a Saturday afternoon to find a completely deserted main street. The first person he meets is Gus, a young, overly friendly neighbor with a pocket flask and an inability to pick up on social cues. Gus and his quarrelsome girlfriend Suzanne quickly latch onto Joel, who, despite sharing little in common with the townie couple, appreciates having someone to hang out with. As Joel settles into his new house, he’s disturbed by strange dreams—some featuring Suzanne—as well as a seizure in the parking lot of the town diner that lands him in the hospital. The flashes of dreams and waking life begin to alternate so quickly that Joel struggles to discern what is real and what is imaginary. Why do Gus and Suzanne seem to care about him so much, considering they just met? And why does this new town seem so empty of people? Garden’s slippery prose reflects the slipstream plot, hinted at during a cerebral conversation in the town’s diner about what happens when you die: “The end is death,” muses Joel. “Or is it? What if it’s just a switch to another continuous line? What if we never actually die, but we just leave this timeline—this world—and join another.” Garden never quite succeeds in establishing a solid reality for the story, however, and when things start to get weird, the experience is less thrilling than confusing. The ending, which the author clearly intends to be explosive, simply fizzles, leaving the reader unsure of the exact nature of the twist the author was aiming for.

A sometimes spooky but more often befuddling story of a man losing his grip on reality.