The Guild of Saint Cooper is a wistful, elegiac and far-reaching cosmic dystopian novel set in Seattle and its suburbs. Blake, the narrator, is a struggling writer burdened by the collapse of the United States due to the drying up of its fossil fuels, the collapse of his ambitions and a mother with terminal cancer. A chance encounter with a mail carrier gets Blake invited to the Guild of Saint Cooper, a group attempting to prop up Seattle's fading sense of self and history by rewriting its past. The tenuousness of memory is an especially bittersweet thread in the book: "my memories seemed to have been swallowed up during the general implosion. Where do memories go to die? Was it trauma that locked them away, or had disinterest kept them from forming in the first place?"
The tales of the guild come surrealistically true; reality and Blake's narrative become joyously unhinged. The metropolis becomes suffused with rhododendrons, as if the city itself is striving toward fertile consciousness. "Perhaps in the vacuum caused by the sudden disappearance of dense civilian life, what remains shifts, reorganizes, compensates for the absence." There are aliens with questionable intent, narratives that switch from first person to third person, gender fluidity of main characters and even the appearance of Twin Peaks's legendary Agent Dale Cooper.
Shya Scanlon is a major talent, rightfully compared to other reality-bending masters like Philip K. Dick and Haruki Murakami. His narrative moves toward an ending that is either apocalyptic or some grand and alien resurrection, leading readers on a wild ride as gorgeous and layered as Russian nesting boxes, provoking as many questions as answers in the end. "A road like a Möbius strip that led to the underside of itself, until you traveled it again to arrive where you'd begun." --Donald Powell, freelance writer