Bad Brains (1992)

I found Kathe Koja’s second novel enthusiastically recommended on booktube—note that it has nothing to do nor even seems familiar with any punk-rock band from D.C. Koja’s first, The Cipher, won a bunch of awards and, even though her story in The Weird (“Angels in Love”) did not impress me much, I decided to give Bad Brains a shot. The premise is that the impoverished main character, Austen, has an accident—takes a fall—and suffers serious brain damage. It is a kind of bravura performance here by Koja. It’s hard to tell how long Austen is in the hospital. It’s at least weeks, possibly months. He has multiple seizures every day until they are finally under control with drugs. These scenes in the hospital are confusing and alarming. Koja’s allusive, detailed prose is well-suited to the harrowing situation. Austen’s situation is close to dire even after he is stabilized. He is a bit of a sad sack, divorced two years but not yet over it. He’s a painter with some interesting ideas and a best friend who owns a gallery and encourages him. But mainly he is poor, sick, and spiraling down. He hits the road with a new friend who is almost as desperate. Things get strange as Austen’s spells of delusion and hallucination have a persistent element—something that is silver. Koja is flirting with one of the most dangerous elements in all fiction, a character who is insane. Because with insanity all bets are off and anything can happen. Don’t you know they’re C - R - A - Z - Y, after all. Koja manages the problem pretty well, with a context that feels real enough we can push against it. Keeping the narrative open to the ooky-spooky supernatural maintains a nice edge too. Her writing style can veer toward the fulsome and she lost me a few times, especially near the end. But the uncanny works well with the material, especially when it stays more in a naturalistic mode. It’s best on seizures and meds and the kind of poverty that forces you off health insurance when you need it most. And I’m glad the supernatural is here too. It helps the narrative fly free and makes its creepiness a good complement to the situation of the starving artist. When you’re teetering at a line between life and death, access to healthcare is more than a winning lifestyle choice. Bad Brains may have been oversold to me a little, raising my expectations too high. But it’s still pretty good, it won a Bram Stoker award, and a lot of people love it. It never scared me but it has good ideas and was never a slog.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.