MAD EDEN

A patient navigator at a gender-affirming care nonprofit traces and retraces the swampy contours of a uniquely disruptive summer.

Ro and their partner, Liam, live on the Florida Panhandle in an uneasy equilibrium—with each other, with their finances, with a world often hostile to queer and neurodivergent people. One summer, “early in the sixth extinction and late in the pandemic” (read: 2023), another character joins them in their remote cottage on the edge of a retention pond: a pervasive, stubborn, defiant joy. The arrival of this joy, inextricably tied to its own departure by the laws of causality and the physics of time, is Ro’s keystone as they recount the summer’s events. There’s a visit from Quentin, an emancipated teen who “was not our child, at least not by blood nor in any legal way, though he called himself our child, or sometimes our son,” on his way to college and eager to start testosterone therapy. There’s Ro’s new diagnosis of autism and the overhanging trauma of a recent hospitalization for suicidality. There’s the turbulent political landscape and the machinations of anti-trans organizers, offering disastrous ramifications for Ro’s life and work. And then there’s Mad Eden, an experimental serial fantasy work posted anonymously to autism subreddits (“the boards”; glimpses into the dynamics of internet subculture here are excruciatingly accurate), its verbiage entirely sourced from the scholarly article Autism as a Disorder of Prediction. The paper is a real one, published in 2014, but it is the novel’s magic entirely that takes the article’s hypothesis and runs, bounding, to new storytelling potentialities. In their debut novel, Thomas demonstrates thrilling control of their craft, delivering a story as thoughtfully constructed as it is exhilarating to read. Ro and Liam are as real and compelling as characters come, their relationship providing the tangible fabric of the novel. There is true symbiosis here between form and content, and it is, simply put, “joyful, that word which suggests two separate things: a substance and its vessel.”

Radically inventive, compassionate, and perspicacious. Compulsively page-turning.