Soda Lake: A Novel by John C Hampsey

"In his new novel Soda Lake, from its Hitchcockian opening scene to its hallucinatory conclusion, John Hampsey continues to do what he does best: narrating through a series of “evolving epiphanies,” those existential moments that unmask our false selves only to reveal a new way of being that just keeps unfolding into radically new manifestations—taking the narrative, the protagonist, the reader, and yes, even the author, into startlingly unexpected worlds of shifting perceptions, and brilliant emanations."
—Robert Inchausti, author of Subversive Orthodoxy: Thomas Merton’s American Prophecy and other works

Soda Lake opens with an unnamed narrator seeing a man disappear into a lake of white salt. This sets the narrator on a quest of discovery, shaped by a series of stories with interconnected characters who all grapple with threats to their identity. The narrator's suspenseful journey mixes personal and collective human history, and his definition of self mysteriously fades as he gets closer to the elusive and timeless “McCuade,” who may or may not be real.

Shifting from the coastal valley of central California to Chicago, Ireland, Greece, and France, each chapter in the novel presents a protagonist in the midst of a psychological struggle wherein the idea of McCuade becomes stronger than the reality of the characters themselves. With a twenty-first-century nod to works as diverse as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Soda Lake blends elements of the archetypal detective quest with stories of the uncanny in order to freshly render the individual human psyche in its struggle to stand up to a progressively transmogrifying world.

John C Hampsey is professor of Romantic and Classical Literature at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where he has won the University Distinguished Teaching Award. Previously, he taught at Boston University and MIT. His previous books include the critically acclaimed Paranoia and Contentment: A Personal Essay on Western Thought and his memoir, Kaufman’s Hill. During his career, Hampsey has had more than thirty stories and essays published in such places as The Gettysburg Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Antioch Review, The Alaska Quarterly, The Boston Globe, Arizona Quarterly, European Romantic Review, Witness, Colby Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and McNeese Review, among many others. He lives in San Luis Obispo, California.