How To Play A Necromancer’s Theremin

I have read some strange novels in my time but Chase Griffinand Christina Quay’s How To Play A Necromancer’s Theremin (2023) is easily one of the most unusual. The book is about a young writer named Echo and his friends touring through locations made famous by their hero Rocco Atleby, an experimental literature rockstar and expert necromancer’s theremin player. Their journey is particularly hazardous because they are bingeing on vast amounts of ground up book pages. In the universe of this book, book powder is highly hallucinogenic, and everyone is consuming vast quantities of it (and several other chemicals) at every turn.

Reading Necromancer’s Theremin is kind of like speed-reading Naked Lunch backwards while simultaneously someone is whispering in your ear as they describe the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). The characters and the reader alike are bouncing around this demented plot like bumper cars that have escaped the amusement park. The rubber reality of this tome of magical realism is stretched way beyond the breaking point as the fourth (and possibly fifth) wall is constantly broken.

My one complaint about the book is that it gets a little overwhelming at times as its strangeness and pacing steamrolled right over me. I don’t know if I recommend reading it in as many or as few sittings as you can. To call this dizzying, and just a little anxiety-inducing for me personally, is an understatement. But I stuck with it and I’m very glad that I did because overall, Griffin and Quay’s book is worth the new grey hairs it gave me. Necromancer’s Theremin is a circuitously dense, bizarrely funny, sometimes frightening, playful, beyond drug-addled, horny, and downright bookish bender gem from (where else?) Florida.