THE BOOK OF SQUIDLY LIGHT

The adventures of a mysterious writer continue in a post-apocalyptic world.

Bushnell’s latest adventure starring Halycon Sage opens with the enigmatic wise man and a ragtag group of miscellaneous characters teaming up to make the best of things in a crisis. Not only has all higher technology stopped working, but also some tenets of basic physics appear to have been canceled; even oil and gasoline no longer combust. The small cast of survivors includes former gangster Ratbone; scientist Preisczech and his culinary-expert wife, Jenny; former pilot Muhammad Abdurraheem Hussein; erstwhile book reviewer Sophie McGregor; and, of course, Sage himself, a Native American writer who’d been “mistakenly raised as an East Coast intellectual,” and his girlfriend, Ruby. They’re all doing what they can to survive; Sage has become his town’s unofficial hunter-gatherer, for instance, and he’s out on the chaparral when a mysterious wagon shows up, driven by the Apocalypse Zombie, a dark figure who, readers are told, knew of Sage’s works before the “Event” that shut down the world. There’s also an alternate reality populated by extraterrestrials called Squidren who venerate The Book of Lighted Squid (which features gnomic passages and nonsense verse such as “Cuttlefish, cuddle fish / Snuggly buggly cuddle fish / Shall you eat it in a dish? / Don’t you touch my cuttlefish!”). Bushnell’s narrative tone is carefree throughout, as in passages such as “Given the post-apocalyptic nature of the situation, it was quite surprising how many people were actually having fun.” As the novel goes on, the plot pinballs among its various subjects with a manic intensity and a surplus of quips and absurdist jokes. This gonzo style is undeniably entertaining on a page-by-page level (“it’s something called badinage,” one alien tells another. “It’s supposed to be funny”). However, some readers may find it a bit too random to be fully satisfying.

A reliably jokey but unevenly executed weird-fantasy novel.