Out of the soggy substrate of the rainsoaked northwest, the genius loci found itself a dark-throated voice upon possessing Chris Damitio to bring us Slackville Road.

If you have ever meditated upon redemption while surrounded by a subsiding sea of characters who move through time and space fueled by an amorphous inertial fog, and if you found yourself curiously surprised when things turned out to be both better and worse than you thought, then this book is worth your time.

Slackville Road is by no means a perfected work. But who finds perfection even remotely interesting? It is an earthy work, a work where you can almost feel the tracery of finespun mycelium trying to digest your toes into mushrooms as you trudge through the mud in drizzle or snow to a remote hotspring where you will stew yourself in dysfunctional magic.

This novel’s birth pangs are rooted in soil and air heavily moistened by the pineapple express. The weather around Bellingham is reminiscent of weather in parts of England, which in combination with the Gulf Stream produced an exquisite form of melancholic thought.

Although not far from the legacy of the beat poets, its rythm and cadence is more realistic than revolutionary. And although it is tempted at times to tread in the steps of William Burroughs, it does not succumb. It is more in the tradition of Henry Miller, sans the hyperbolic hyperventilative 64th notes. Damitio is doing what he must, and willing to pay the price of taking the risk to do it.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but in this book there is enough truth to make an appetizing fiction if your tastes traffic in a world where when the going gets weird the weird turn pro. Here turning pro means first finding that most barriers we live within are imaginary (Jack Novak finds himself in a Job like tailspin of Biblical proportions), and then embarking on a journey of transcendence as we become aware we’re getting our grubby hands on the levers of power that when manipulated might shorten or extend the karmic cycle, and then jinxing the whole thing just in case.

Jack Novak, the main character, changes and sees those around him changing in surprising ways as he steps through what appear to be hopeless obstacles, only to find in their imaginary substance something that prods him to test whether the relationship between risk and reward is as fixed as “they” say.

We are on the cusp of experiencing a world Chris Damitio’s vision has already taken him to, and from which Slackville Road is but an early account of what conditions will soon be like for more of us. Slackville Road, in conjuction with his other book Rough Living, form a binary vortex of how we might thrive through increasingly apocalyptic contretemps.