THE GATEPOST

In Weed’s novel, a woman follows in the footsteps of her father, a famed psychedelic researcher who mysteriously disappeared.

Thirty-something Esme Weatherhead talks to the “ghost” (memory) of her father, Gregory, who’s finally been declared dead after disappearing decades earlier. It’s 2024, and it’s been over half a year since she left behind her seemingly picture-perfect life in San Francisco to write a celebration of her father at his former cabin in Woodgate, Vermont. Gregory was an academic researcher and bestselling author on Indigenous shamanic practices who went missing in 2004 after leaving for a walk in the forest. After discovering notes her father left about a cave in the same forest in which he was last seen, Esme hires Lucas St. Pierre, a struggling geological consultant, to locate it (“maybe walking a mile or two in his shoes was the best way to find out what had happened to him”). Esme decides to “reconstruct [Gregory’s] research methodology” by experimenting with powerful psychedelic mushrooms—the same her father used—which trigger vivid hallucinations of him. The lines of reality start to blur, and the stakes increase when a longtime family friend, Sebastian Bonney (a former British television personality who now owns a surveillance tech firm), sets his sights on Esme’s new discovery of the deeper powers of these mushrooms. The narrative shifts between timelines and the perspectives of Esme, Gregory, Lucas, and Sebastian; this approach complements the psychedelically charged prose. A hallucinatory thriller is a fascinating concept, and the plot is a treat. Witty prose sits alongside stretches of juvenile profanity, along with occasional overstuffed sentences: “It was nearly tasteless and quite rubbery, like a very bland calamari, but he chewed and swallowed it anyway, and cut the flesh of the remaining sponges into ragged strips, leaving them on a sun-heated boulder to dry.” Still, the adventure overcomes such minor issues.

A compellingly trippy journey.