River : An American Dreaming

A buried river, a legendary snake, and a nation dreaming itself into madness—RIVER is a hallucinatory excavation of the American experiment. In RIVER An American Dreaming, Christoph Keller conjures a work of rare imaginative ambition: at once a mythic thriller, an excavation of buried histories, and a razor-edged meditation of the fate of the other. Set in New York City during the haunted year of 2011, the novel unfolds as a great unearthing—of an ancient river, a legendary Lenape snake, and the fever dreams at the very root of American dreaming. At the novel’s center sits Kurt H. Adler, a wheelchair-bound archaeologist whose mind is as trenchant as it is tormented. A series of bizarre and violent incidents—a curator snipping hair from strangers, a subway miracle, a motorcyclist leaving a trail of blood—pull him into an inquiry that leads not only beneath the city, but into the shadow-realms of identity, possession, and belief. Echoing Goethe’s Mephistopheles, Bulgakov’s Devil, and indigenous cosmologies long overwritten by conquest, Keller composes a hallucinatory portrait of a nation in the grip of its own mythology. His language is exact, exuberant, laced with dark humor and lyrical grace. In an era when reality itself feels increasingly fictive, RIVER is both provocation and antidote—a novel that dares to dream America differently, by returning to the riverbed where its dreaming began. Excerpt: Three things happened that strange July morning. One: Neema Smallwood woke to find herself sitting up in bed, singing a song she had never heard in a language she didn’t know but somehow understood. Two: She was flapping her arms like wings, knocking over the glass of water on her bedside table. Three: The water spilled—down the nightstand, onto the floor, under her bed. She knew she was singing inside the mind of a hunter, guiding him straight to her so he could kill her. And yet, she felt no urge to stop. When the song ended, she looked down. Her bedside table was dry. The floor was dry. Her glass of water was full. It must have been a dream. But then, it happened again.