In the academic year 2003-04 I was a senior in high school. Because I had enough credits to graduate, and because I felt that high school kids who took classes in local colleges because they have maxed out their high schools were goobers (I still tend to think this in cases that don't hinge around mathematics and/or students who need to take financial advantage of the state paying for their credits), because my high school had a closed campus, and because my schedule that year was first period creative writing, free hour, free hour, lunch, lunch, free hour, gym (basketball), gym (swimming), I spent periods two through seven in the library.
There were windows in the library all along one wall with spinning book racks of trade paperbacks separated by sets of chairs. I started at the row furthest to the left (upon entering the library), and over the course of the semester read everything on every one of those racks. On one of those racks I found a book that was going to haunt me for a decade: Brian Lumley's Psychosphere, the first novel in the Psychomech trilogy.
Psychosphere is a bad novel. It is, in fact, one of the worst novels that I have ever read. Characters speak almost entirely in ejaculation, and it is rare to find a line of dialogue that doesn't end in an exclamation point. The plot makes very little sense. The villain of the piece, Charon Gubwa (a sexually deviant African albino) is offensive on racial, sexual, gendered, and feasibility grounds. The hero, Richard Garrison, is unintentionally rendered as a total asshole who, at the end of the novel ascends to godhead for some reason. Its depictions of violence are cruel, its depictions of sex are lurid. I read the entire novel in one afternoon. When I returned to the same rack the next day Psychosphere was gone. I checked for it every day for the rest of the year, it was never returned to the shelf. I began to wonder if Psychosphere weren't some sort of insane dream.
Over the next several years, I searched libraries and used bookstores for some sign of the novel. I found other Brian Lumley texts, his execrable Necroscrope series, a series called The Dreamlands, the novels of Titus Crow (Lumley's flacid attempt to enter into Lovecraft's cosmos), each as terrible as Psychosphere but far easier to find. If you industrious and masochistic you can even find a series of pseudo-scientific essays that Lumley has penned on black holes that read like the insane ramblings of a teenager who has just learned basic terms like "event horizon" and "gravity well." It is some genuinely bonkers stuff.
There are some writers who give you the feeling, when you read their books, that you are in the presence of a truly superior intellect. They have produced something that you could never have even conceived of, if they hadn't done it for you. I feel like this whenever I sit down with Borges, Shakespeare, James Baldwin, and Nabokov (amongst many, many others). Lumley is the precise opposite. There is a profound dumbness to these texts, a basic failure to understand how things work, how the connect, what kinds of consequences might follow even basic actions.
Two years ago, in a Half Price Books in Waukesha, Wisconsin, I found a copy of Psychomech, the first book in the trilogy. I purchased it, and read it that night. It was the first copy I had ever seen. It was just as bad as Psychosphere, though it did answer several confusing questions of the kind that are generated when one has only read the second book in a trilogy. A year later, at Schuler's in Lansing, I found Psychamok the final book in the trilogy that centers around Richard Garrison's son. I had still never seen a copy of Psychosphere since that day in my high school library, but finding, and purchasing, these books provided physical evidence that it had not been a dream. Somehow this made it worse.
Last year for Christmas, I was given a copy by someone who knew about this hunt. It was a wonderful gesture. But I still look for it every time I go into a bookstore. I've still never seen one in the wild.
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