Subdivision

A Novel

By: J. Robert Lennon

Narrated by: Nicole Poole

An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse's owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life.

Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a series of darkly comic encounters reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels. A lovelorn truck driver...a mysterious child...a watchful crow. A cryptic birthday party. A baffling physics experiment in a defunct office tower where some calamity once happened. Through it all, the narrator is tempted and manipulated by the bakemono, a shape-shifting demon who poses a distinctly terrifying danger.

Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, Subdivision is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called "a master of the dark arts." With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to fans of Broken River, J. Robert Lennon continues his exploration of the mysteries of perception and memory.

©2021 J. Robert Lennon (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

What the F was that?

It’s hard to overstate how much I love J. Robert Lennon’s micro fiction. It’s hard to overstate how much I hated this “novel.” Several hours of disparate events, the narrator evidently dreaming or hallucinating, as if I’d narrated in unconnected stream-of-consciousness style. Nothing happens. Then it ends. Guantánamo should use this audio book as torture during interrogations. Again: Lennon‘s micro fiction is on my of all-time favorites. But Subdivision was a literary hell.