My Volcano

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock is spotted by a jogger growing from the Central Park Reservoir. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it's nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.

As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.

With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.

*NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS*
*WINNER OF THE SATOR NEW WORKS AWARD*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK PRIZE*

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Magical Realism, Fantasy, Canada

330 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2022

About the author

John Elizabeth Stintzi is an award-winning trans writer and visual artist who was born and raised on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario, and is currently writing and living in the United States.

They are the winner of the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, the 2019 Long Poem Prize from The Malahat Review, and the inaugural Sator New Works Award from Two Dollar Radio. Their work has been published in places like Ploughshares,Black Warrior Review, PRISM International, Kenyon Review Online, and Best Canadian Poetry.

Their debut novel Vanishing Monuments (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020) was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and their debut poetry collection Junebat (House of Anansi, 2020) was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. Their newest novel, My Volcano (Two Dollar Radio (US) and Arsenal Pulp Press (CA/UK) 2022, Tlon (ITALY) 2023, and Cielo Santo (SPAIN) 2024) and was longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library's 2022 Book Prize for Fiction, and named a best book of the year by Kirkus Reviews, New York Public Library, The Independent Review, and others.

Their latest book, a collection of short stories called Bad Houses, came out from Arsenal Pulp Press in 2024. They are currently at work illustrating their first graphic novel: Automaton Deactivation Bureau.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Volcano has all the ingredients of a fantastic novel. Great characters. Inspired symbolism. Political astuteness. Queer sensibility. The story centers around a volcano that suddenly emerges from the Central Park reservoir during the summer of 2016, initially causing alarm and intrigue, but soon fading into the scenery as everyone soon becomes accustomed to its presence. Stintzi pulls off the dark comedy with aplomb and creates a great cast of characters, scattered across the globe. Stintzi also makes explicit connections to some of the disasters of 2016, directly referencing the Pulse Nightclub shooting, as well as other instances of gun violence, and indirectly (but quite obviously) referencing another monstrosity arising from New York that year. The narrative faltered a bit for me with the overstuffed roster of characters - there are at least nine main characters, each with their own story line - and a long middle where the momentum slowed. But it picks up again toward the end and was a cracking good read.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded down for unnecessary obscurantism

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember Cloud Atlas? How people fussed and fumed over its interlocking time-narratives, and complained that they were "obscurantist divagations unequaled since Pynchon took the stylus away from Gertrude Stein"? (Okay, okay, I'm quoting myself from Goodreads. Sue me.)

But really, this is a challenge for linear readers to get any information or pleasure from reading it. If you'll give Author Stintzi a lot of rope, you can lasso a meaning from all two hundred-plus chapters. (I lost track at two-hundred four, and was reading way after that.) There's something...overwhelming...about that many voices coming at you, no matter what story they're telling. I don't think for an instant that was accidental. It was a choice, a decision to make the polyphony (babble to some of us) of the modern info-saturated landscape into an experiential reality. In that aim, it feels like Author Stintzi is channeling Annihilation with the entire Earth as Area X. People become something Other, as in a spiky plant; the things they pass by casually turn into that same spiky plant; what better visualization of the radicalizing effect of social media?

One character even says, I didn't want to say anything because someone would tell me they knew, about the appearance of a freakin' VOLCANO in Manhattan! That utter break in the fabric of reality wasn't worth commenting on in case it was "old news" and you'd look like you were out of touch for saying anything about it! This also echoes the storytelling hook Author Stintzi uses of beginning each character's section (they're too short for me to call them "chapters" with a straight (!) face) with a now-commonplace personal disaster...a body transformed, a police shooting, a homeless person being violated...that simply, numbingly, takes place. Nothing is made of this. In a world where Sandy Hook didn't result in stringent gun-control laws, that's a given. Sadly.

Which, I think, nicely makes their point for them: The story's set in 2016, the year a giant volcano appeared and took over every aspect of our lives and has shaped the vile, reprehensible political and social landscape of 2022. Too many of us live inside echo chambers, bubbles of resounding agreement with any willingness to agree to disagree. I certainly do...and I'm stayin' in here. In placing the action in that before-and-after year, Author Stintzi remodels reality to punish Humankind for its unkindness and carelessness and concupiscence.

The real question I see emerging from the immensity of Author Stintzi's imagination is not can Humankind be saved...should Humankind be saved? We can exist in a world where the weirdest, awfulest, cruelest (one section deals with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, another historical inflection point) disasters elicit nothing, not a single impulse, towards others' needs, but only our own.

One character, called only "the white trans writer", is seen writing away...feedback of the most bracing honesty (read: the truth hurts) foremost in their mind, trying to make a story about an alien planet work. (Author Stintzi's nonbinary, not trans, but the point is made.) They're in some kind of existential despair. Writing will, in fact, do that to you. And listing the forty-nine names of the victims of 2016's Pulse nightclub shooting will reinforce that despair if you're One of Us...but the character speaks for the whole world when they say:

Eventually, sitting down to write the novel felt like sitting down to watch the end of the world. As if they were simply waiting to watch the planet finally spill its fetid, destructive insides out.

That is what Author Stintzi's accomplished with My Volcano, and it's either a cathartic emesis or a wracking, heaving hurl of the toxic crap you took in to make everything okay for a few hours.

[Nadine in California · Rating 4 out of 5]

A modestly voiced book where everything (not anything) happens - and unhappens and rehappens and dehappens. The author has lots of plates spinning at once, including a large cast of characters we rotate among very quickly, yet I was amazed at how easy it was for me to keep track of who was doing what. In this way, the book is deceptively effortless - a huge amount of invisible organization must control all the apparent randomness. On top of that, the book is very readable. I found myself flying through it, and I think that's the best way to read it - not to get bogged down in hows or whys, but to just let it all rush past your senses.

The contrast between the charming innocence of the voice and the maelstrom of dystopic activity is striking and oddly comforting too. Here's a little throw-away sentence that captures this voice:

"Oh," Makayla said, while at the same time she thought to herself: Oh.”

It's hard not to talk about this book in general terms, since otherwise you'd get bogged down in happenings, but I will mention two specifics that especially struck me, one fun, one tragic:

First the fun: There is a company called "Easy-Rupt" with offices around the country that offer small soundproof, padded rooms that people can rent for 30 minutes - 25 minutes for freaking out (usually lots of yelling and crying) plus 5 minutes for staff clean up.

The tragic: the tale is periodically broken up by a blank page with just a few sentences describing people, usually young, who lost their lives to gun violence in the US, whether a mass shooting, a police shooting, or a hate crime shooting.

Before I read the book, the cover seemed odd and a little creepy. After reading, it seemed like the perfect combo of modest voice and weird world. I was amazed that any artist could capture this combo so well, until I saw that the author did the cover design. Only one mind could work exactly this way ;)

The title caused me to develop an earworm of that song from the late 70's, "My Sherona". (Muh Muh Muh My Volcano.) I wish it would stop and I apologize if I infected anyone else with it.

[Sage Agee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fucking existential treasure

[Phyllis · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mind is blown. This is the most interesting, creative, intricately-woven, brain-bending, thought-provoking novel I've read in years.

It won't be a novel for everyone, and in fact I hadn't wanted to read it based on its marketing blurb -- I read it only because it was shortlisted for the 2023 Tournament of Books. It's also a book you have to commit to, as there were times in the beginning of it when I was so baffled I considered giving it up. But once I began to understand what was happening, I was all in. And I had to chuckle when, about 2/3rds through it seemed as though the author had known exactly what I'd been thinking, when a thesis adviser to one of the characters who is an aspiring writer tells them their draft novel doesn't work:
"she didn't think the book worked. There was too much going on . . . choose [one] story . . . the more interesting, fully lived story. The other story complicated the project, obscured the goals their adviser presumed were its goals. The reader got lost in the movement -- the whiplash -- between the two narratives, and readers of a book should never be lost."
Now, I'm sitting here just wowed by this complicated novel.

The story opens in New York City on June 2, 2016, where a mound (ultimately determined to be a volcano) has begun rising in Central Park. From there, the story leaps and plunges and swerves to and between locations and characters all over planet earth, with the primary story occurring between June 2 and August 17, 2016. As the narrative unfolds, time within the novel begins to split into simultaneously occurring threads, so that a character can be in two timelines (or even three) at the same time, with or without their awareness. Similarly, what happens in the world varies among the timelines.

There are 232 numbered sections in the book -- some as short as a single sentence; others as long as a few pages -- and every section is a switch to a different character from the section before. There are also unnumbered individual pages, appearing here and there throughout the book, that recite the non-fictional name, age, and date & circumstances of death of real people who died under terrible circumstances during June, July, and August of 2016. The human characters of the story are uniquely individual. There is a line from about midway through the novel that describes a story one of the characters is trying to write, and I think it captures this novel: "a double helix. . . . [A] story about . . . people who don't believe their world can imagine a future for them. . . . [A] story where people can't find a way to belong, because maybe there isn't a way." But that is only halfway through, and in the back half of the novel, many of those characters are able to see their own true selves, to find a way to be in the world.

Meanwhile, the people of planet earth quickly lose interest in the presence of the New York City volcano and in all of the other anomalies happening all over the earth, both to individual people and to the planet as a whole. They stop seeing them, noticing them, being shocked by them, feeling the need to do anything about them.
"The warnings were there, of course, in their mere existence, but they hadn't been paid the proper attention. Few had taken them seriously enough. They just laughed them off, and lived within sight of them."
And even when some folks finally get around to saying something must be done -- "So many bodies on so many streets with so many different signs that all said roughly the same thing: we need to talk about what's happening." -- people just talk past each other and degenerate into warring tribes without solutions.

This novel is about as fantastical as it gets. The human characters have otherworldly experiences, sometimes while they are awake and sometimes while they are asleep, some seeming to really occur and others seeming to be only imaginary. There are characters from somewhere other than earth, sometimes appearing in a quasi-human form and sometimes appearing as columns of light or as the mist of a cloud, seen only by some people and not by others. The earth and its non-human creatures and plants and elements are themselves a force, perhaps acting organically or perhaps under the influence of otherworldly creatures. The story suggests what might be seen if lifeforms came from another place to examine earth, looking "across the planet, scanning it for signs of life. Of life worth emulating. Of life worth paying attention to."

As the author writes: "so here . . . we are."

[Sunny Lu · Rating 2 out of 5]

intentionally piecemeal, unintentionally somewhat problematic?? kind of cool nonetheless, not that original though, pretty white

[Domenica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting, confounding, and singular. This novel is unlike anything I've read before—yet it was effortless to become fully immersed in the strangeness. A hybrid of sci-fi, magic realism, eco-dystopia, folktale, cultural satire, elegy, and more. At each new piece added, new character introduced, new timeline branch-off, new genre played with, I though I'd surely reach my over-saturation point. But that point never arrived. Just incredibly well-done, and very felt.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a crazy brave, time-jumping, narrative juggling, mind-altering trip this novel is! Unlike anything I’ve ever read before, this book examines issues of identity and how human beings can and do harm nature and each other, and how the natural world can harm us in return.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fascinating and sometimes frustrating novel. I usually have trouble with multi-perspective narratives with huge casts that are as event-driven as this. But most of the characters and threads are colorful, memorable, and affecting, and one is not just swept along by the explosion of creative, truly alien ideas. (References to dark real-world events and concerns are also interwoven throughout.) I can enjoy vignettes like this even though the connection with the main events is not clear:

... The sigh continued, and Sam slowly deflated in her chair into an empty pile. Carl reached over and finished the glass of water, then picked up Sam's light, deflated body. He carried it out to the car, with a spool of waxed string he used for tying meat for barbecues. He drove out toward the beach, parked illegally, and on the beach tied the string to Sam's deflated wrists, her deflated ankles. The wind was strong, ... and as Carl ran down the beach with the spool of string in his hand, Sam lifted up into the sky.

I'm not a fan of the apocalyptic blowout final sections; the quiet redemptive end recalled the earlier, intimate tableaux that I loved, but seemed somehow less than satisfactory to me. In any case, this is an impressive debut, and I look forward to more from the author. (3.5 stars.)

[Jonathan Hawpe · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ecopocalyptic layer cake of a novel spiraling from contemporary Manhattan back to Aztec Tenochtitlan with a mysterious volcano, a hive-mind metamorphosis, a boulder creature, temporal instability, and much more, fusing the tender surreality of Murakami with Pynchonian politico-philisophical satire.

[Peyton · Rating 2 out of 5]

He may as well live on the knife's edge of risk, having realized then that he was already living on the face of the blade.

My Volcano is an experimental science fiction novel by Canadian author John Elizabeth Stinzi. I decided to pick up this book because I really enjoy experimental fiction and I was intrigued by the premise: a sudden appearance of a volcano in New York sets of a chain of events involving characters from around the globe. The characters of this story are certainly its strength; ultimately, they were what compelled me to continue reading after a very slow start. Several different compelling character perspectives are explored through short, nonlinear chapters. My Volcano strives to evoke the ennui of our era, but in doing so, it left me with mainly feelings of ennui while reading. My Volcano is full of 'fake deep' statements about globalization and technology that leave little impact when compared with other experimental and contemporary works about the same issues. Towards the end of the book, the nonlinear plot structure loses its coherence. Plot holes are left unaddressed, and we are clearly expected as readers to accept them. Having read some truly fantastic nonlinear novels, this left me unimpressed. Lastly, I will simply point out that Stinzi refers to a main character by their race in every single sentence the character is mentioned. My Volcano is ultimately a book of interesting concepts poorly executed.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chaotic, creative, confusing, surrealistic jumble that seems, I think, to center ideas of trans-ness, of discomfort inside one’s body, of alienation from the reality one is expected to inhabit by outside forces. It’s frustrated and apocalyptic, yet without a misanthropic outlook, and hopeful that we can do better. Not everything about this novel works for me but it’s a memorable and surprising read.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual read for me…an eco-horror allegory by the non-binary author Stintzi, in which a volcano that springs up in New York City’s Central Park becomes a vehicle for examining the global impacts of climate change and economic exploitation of the environment. I loved Stintzi’s huge cast of characters, and their short chapters and creative plotting made this a fun, quick read. Part of the 2023 Tournament of Books.

[Laurie Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely weird, transcendental journey through myth and time. A critical exploration of our consumerism and pollution filled world. A very odd story that demanded my careful attention. Not a quick read but a meaningful one. It’s hard to describe; I think you should just read it- you’ll be in for a thoughtful treat.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this is like looking directly into the sun--it's dazzling and it WILL immolate you. Stintzi's book is complex, refractive, reflective, and thought-provoking as it explores the fractiousness of our modern world through a dizzying array of surreal threads. Excellent stuff (as always).

5/5

[Laura Sackton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very close to perfect. Weird and beautiful. Read my review here: https://booksandbakes.substack.com/p/...

[Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok FIRSTABLY this only took me so long to read because I was finishing my last term of grad school and was totally swamped. I wanted to just keep going every time I picked it up.

I'm a big fan of JES' writing and was beyond excited for this release. The cover blurb had me super hyped, and I'm thrilled to report it was worth the wait.

My Volcano sucks you in right from the start with the introduction of a volcano suddenly sprouting from the ground in Central Park. Stintzi goes on to weave in the stories of a variety of people: scholars, scientists, a trans writer, lovers fresh after a breakup, not quite lovers, and more transient characters that are more difficult to pin down. On paper, that sounds like an editorial miss sure to confuse readers, but Stintzi handled these characters so thoughtfully that each shined through clearly and brightly on their own.

What really got me was the way these deeply real characters interacted with science fiction and absurdity in this universe. Stintzi strikes a beautiful chord between what's real in our world and what's real in this world and what simply can't be real in either, yet the reader believes. You believe the world is messed up enough to sell ad space on a natural phenomenon. You believe a business thrives where you pay to scream and cry and briefly exist in an isolated room. You believe you can talk to yourself, but really.

The thrill of this packed novel was the constant surprise that unfurled, which encourages me to keep this review light and brief. In short: read it. Read it now. Read it more than once. Read it through different lenses. Make someone else read it. Take every advantage.

Thanks to Edelweiss and Two Dollar Radio for the review copy.

[Katelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

there aren’t really words to describe what I just experienced. so here are some pixels to entice you: 🗻👼🏼🎥🌀🔥👾🍋❇️

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my fave book of 2022 so far! MY VOLCANO by John Elizabeth Stintzi was my most anticipated book of this year and it honestly exceeded my expectations! I loved this book! It’s an intricate story that starts with a volcano suddenly rising in Central Park and follows a diverse set of characters as they deal with this climate disaster and other weird events in their lives.
.
As soon as I got this book I read it right away and I savoured every page. There’s a lot going on in this book! Here’s some of what I loved about this novel:
.
- short chapters, I love a fast paced book
- multiple POV featuring diverse characters including younger, older, trans, queer, and several different ethnicities
- the back and forth timeline, it sounds confusing but it was really fun to relive the same dates around the world
- the surreal events that combine myths and supernatural elements, makes me wonder
- dazzling writing that weaves such a complex tale that had me thinking the whole time while I was reading that I don’t want this to end, how could it even end? And then it was perfect!
.
I’ve now read and loved all of JES’s books and eager to read everything they write or recommend! Truly a talented and creative mind and one of my fave authors!
.
And shoutout to Fleck Creative for the thoughtful book design! I love the details!
.
Thank you to Arsenal Pulp Press for my advance reading copy!

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Volcano is weird, random, and a whiplash of a ride. There are many characters with a lot of very different events happening. A loose correlation connects some, while others have a definitive through line. The narrative bounces back and forth in time, and even rewinds back on itself at points. If that does not sound appealing to you, then this book is probably not what you are looking for. If that does not scare you, there is a lot of cool imagery and ideas throughout these pages. The cast is diverse, the events are somber yet awesome, and in the end, I think everything comes together in a cohesive, hopeful way. I enjoyed this a lot, and think it will be taking up space in my brain for some time to come.

[Debs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rated three stars for the expanse and the uniqueness; my enjoyment level reading it was 1.75 stars. This was not my thing at all, but I’m not a quitter.

[Bob Lopez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was really loving this novel, its quirks, it's myriad characters, its winding, twisting, time-jumping plot, and oh! That volcano in the middle of New York City! But then the volcano took a backseat, and the quirks started to irk, and I got confused by the time-jumping. All the old Otherwises as Gods riding up animal-legged mobile homes is a fantastic visual, and I think resetting the world to pre-plot is a helpful device when you write yourself into a corner (which is not to suggest that happened here).

I found the epigraphic remembrances of the trans victims of hate crimes jarring, as I think the author intended. Their frequency and their senselessness is disturbing and took me right out of the book; I often found myself in research/internet black holes for long stretches while I read about the victims and tried to find instances of justice being served on their perpetrators. Some were new to me, some were familiar. I had a hard time connecting them to the themes of the novel, such as it is, and can only postulate that they are there to break up the experience of our escapism with the harsh realities these lives have to bear, realities they cannot escape, not even for a moment to enjoy a sorta silly book about a volcano sprouting up in Central Park.

[ea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is weird, the very best kind of weird. With astounding ease the non-linear narrative morphs through the summer of 2016 as a multitude of protagonists bring to light questions of identity and queerness and community and connection.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Geologists pulled out their hair.
‘This is not how the world is supposed to work,’ they said.” (pg. 296)

A book can be very weird, or it can be very long, but it can’t be both without becoming too frustrating. My Volcano is a powerful dose of magical surrealism, but drags on a bit too long, allowing the surreal to unravel too far into an absurd oatmeal. I can appreciate what John Elizabeth Stintzi was trying to accomplish with My Volcano (and I love seeing geology featured in fiction), but as a whole it misses the mark for me.

“Duncan didn’t say anything. He was no longer sure there were any explanations at all.” (pg. 211)
“What would have been the point? There would be no way to know anything for certain.” (pg. 221)
“—It is hard to explain, Angel said, and would say about many things.” (pg. 248)

Not-quite-right geology:

“As the volcano finally reached its moment, the Richter scales—tapped into the pulse of the plate all across the continent—crescendoed.” (pg. 269)

The Richter scale, despite its name, is not like a bathroom scale – it is not a measurement device and cannot collect data; it’s just a numeric ranking for the strength of an earthquake based on data collected by a seismometer. “Richter scales” could be more accurately replaced with “seismometers” in this quoted excerpt.

Typo:

“[…] found an article about a bizarre phenomenon where violet color briefly spilled over a small protion [portion] of Antarctica during a heavy storm on July 10.” (pg. 116)

[Theresa]

Read this because my husband LOVED it. A strange magical surrealism apocalypse experiment.

I was entertained, confused, and exhausted by it.

It’s comprised of hundreds of short sections, many only a page long. Reading it felt like watching a frenetic improv show where the actors are on speed AND acid.

There are dozens of characters and the book zig-zags between them quickly. People turn into animals, gods, fire, to stone and back again. One person exists in two timelines at once. A few people exist in multiple places at once. Many non-human items have sentience and act as characters, like a ceramic lemon, malevolent piles of rocks, a plant/animal-hybrid organism that takes over the consciousness of every being it encounters, volcanos, the Statue of Liberty, and beams of light (which may be from outer space?). Sometime people die but walk into a scene later and you just have to roll with it. You just have to let everything wash over you without trying to make too much sense of it.

I was swept along and impressed by the depth and breadth of this book, but I was also relieved to finish it.

[Lau Vander Mijnsbrugge · Rating 3 out of 5]

a book with mixed storylines, throwing you from one life into another. the switch of perspective and always adding more stories worked very well for me, just as the magical and uncanny events happening all the time. by the end of the book, i found some stories too self-explanatory or even pedantic. i was unsatisfied with the ending i guess. yet, i loved the short chapters and the easiness and speed that added to the book.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book to be a real slog. It was listed on the 2023 Tournament of Books, which is usually a pretty good predictor of if I'll like a book. Not this time. I found the book to be pretentious and uninteresting. The story follows many different characters in many different timelines for usually only a page at a time. The characters weren't given the time to develop enough that I cared about them and when a giant volcano killed them all (in one timeline I guess) I couldn't have cared less.

The story (if you can call it that) is that one day, with no warning, a volcano rises out of the Central Park Lake and continues to grow and grow until much of the city becomes uninhabitable. The narration switches between many characters in many different countries and cultures and weaves in mythology, superpowers, the supernatural and science. The author tries to do way too much without doing any of it particularly well. I honestly had trouble getting through it.

[Jack Tedone · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid 4 stars and definitely worth the read

[hayley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book didn’t justify the work it took to read. Too many characters and an all-over-the-place storyline.

[RF Brown]

In 2016, a geologically impossible volcano rises up through New York's Central Park Reservoir, two cataclysmic miles tall. From John Elizabeth Stintzi's fragmented eco-horror novel "My Volcano" bursts the molten matter of subplots and characters. Each are directly or randomly rooted to each other in history, geography, identity, vocation, or even indiscriminate psychic telepathy. A New York homeless man is gifted a magic jewell that represents the choice between material wealth and knowledge of the volcano's supernatural secrets. A Nigerian scholar, in Japan, discovers the ethnological origins of a global folktale about an angry demigod descending from a volcano to destroy the world. A shadowy immortal woman in Alaska builds a diorama of the volcano with altering miniatures that tableaux the oscillations of time. And each of the dozen or more interwoven narratives are directly or tenuously rooted to the experience or meaning of volcanoes, each person's volcano. Perhaps most poignantly, a nomadic farmer in the Gobi Desert is stung by an enchanted bee and transformed into a humanoid green wild thistle, and he rhizosphereically grows into a zone the size of a new continent, cultivating every organic existence as part of his single consciousness. In Botany, a rhizome is the stem system that connects the subterranean roots to the surface parts of a plant, and in French theorists Deleuze and Guattari's monograph "A Thousand Plateaus," they use rhizome as a symbol to describe modes of decentered creativity, language, and thinking which, like the composition of this of novel, are non-linear, non-spacial, and non-hierarchical. "My Volcano" approximates the characteristics of a postmodern rhizomatic text. The stories are simultaneously diverse and entirely connected. The complex structure models Deleuze's concept of multiplicity, characters do not represent a greater whole and have no prior unity. There are asignifying ruptures, the rhizome is broken by the death of characters and the seeming termination of plotlines, but these characters start again on lines old and new. And the earth of the novel is only an experimental contact with the real, its open map can be reversed, torn, or adapted by any individual, group, or social formation, and the multiple volcanoes are both entryways and exits. But what does this novel's rhizome mean philosophically? Stintzi, describing the consciousness of the farmer transformed into the humanoid plant in the center of the herd of billions, writes that the expansion made him feel more whole, as if every single being on the planet had been something missing. Women, men, pets, queer people; cattle, camels, bees, birds. Every human, animal, and plant the throng touches joins a state of being pieced together in a network of green and moving information. Everything in the world finally working in sync. Every creature sharing one same want. In one of My Volcano's several simultaneous endings, perhaps the one where lava from the volcano flows down the avenues of New York City at 100 miles per hour, a differently-abled astronomer in Chile concludes the earth remains the same as it always existed, that the current nonsense was no less ordinary than the nonsense found in the whole of human history. In the world's chaos, many people defect to the continent of the new green herd. They see peace, beauty, connection, and the relative oblivion of an inescapable community. Stintzi is proposing this network, this everything, this ecological connection, this volcano, is the true face of the world rising to the surface.