A weird, experimental debut novel, Oh God, the Sun Goes is set in a world where the sun has mysteriously, unexplainably disappeared. As an unnamed narrator heads west, the book takes a hairpin turn into a searing and eerie romance.
The summary for Oh God, the Sun Goes is below, followed by the previously released cover and a two-chapter excerpt.
The sun has disappeared from the sky. No one can explain where it has gone, but one wayward traveler is determined to try. As our unnamed narrator begins his odyssey across the parched landscapes of the American Southwest, he is drawn into a web of illusion and mystery, a shifting astral mindscape that shimmers with the aftermath of loss—and the promise of redemption.
The walk across the parking lot is a long one. It stretches out like a walk through a desert—a second becomes a minute and then an hour and then a second again. And after a few moments pass, a car pulls up next to me and someone rolls down the window.
“Hi there,” says a woman, smoking a camel out the driver’s side. She taps it against the window.
“You left this in the diner,” she says, reaching down and grabbing an envelope—she hands it to me.
Ah, I mutter. “Can’t believe I forgot.”
She nods. A car pulls into the lot.
“Are you from Tempe?”“No,” I say. “I’ve been here a month.”“A month,” says the woman, taking a smoke of the cigarette.
Her hair is the color of the camel. “What brings you here?” “The sun,” I say. “I’m looking for it.”
“I see,” says the woman, staring now. “Looking for it.” “I am,” I say.
The woman pauses for a minute, then speaks again.
“You know, my son, he’s the star of the swim team at school.”
“The day the sun went missing, he woke up and forgot how to swim. I swear to god, the day the sun went away, my son jumped in the pool and sunk straight to the bottom, completely forgot how to move his arms and legs, his teammates had to pull him out.”
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“He was going to swim at nationals. He’d been training all year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say, and the woman nods in agreement, blinking an eye.
“Anyway,” she says, outing her cigarette on the side of the car. “I should get going,” and within a minute, she taps on the gas and pulls suddenly away.
And for a moment I’m thinking about the bottom of pools, about the star of the swim team sinking to the bottom, waking up one morning and forgetting how to swim. The same day the sun goes missing, how odd.
Odd.Odd.
A moment later, and I’m on the highway.
I’m on a road headed out of Tempe, towards the desert, winding and unwinding into the distance like a shoelace loosening itself—a burlap ribbon coming undone—Tempe is behind now, and the desert is ahead.
The desert is a long expanse of dirt, and rocks and crags and cacti that line the road like hitchhikers looking for a ride. The sky here is the same sky as anywhere, but brighter now, but somehow harder to see. As the desert goes on, its shapes come only slightly into focus, each rock a hidden object in sand.
Somewhere in the distance is a town named Sun City, which is where I’m headed today, to meet Dr. Higley. Sun City—of all names for a town in Arizona—is where Dr. Higley lives, where he’s lived for the past eighteen years with his wife, Martha Adie. Dr. Higley is now retired, but apparently in his day he was a leading mind in the field of solar astronomy, specifically helioseismology, the study of the sun and its seismic movements. Sun City is about forty miles away from Tempe, just north of Phoenix, and I should get there with plenty of daytime to kill.
The road I’m on now is becoming more and more narrow, which is nice because there’s less to focus on—the mind can wander elsewhere, like towards the landscape and the thoughts layered in it—a thought of a rock passes beside me, and without knowing, I’m thinking about a mountain I once climbed—I’m thinking about the top of the mountain, how quiet it was, how you could see for miles in every direction— I’m thinking about how the mountain looked out over a desert, and how the desert looked very much like this one, sparse and wide open, with craters and crags everywhere.
A thought of a shrub passes by, and then a ditch, and a burrow, and suddenly the image of sand comes over my mind and I’m thinking about something someone once told me about sand. They said sand is like the past—it’s the same and different each time you see it. They mentioned something about a footprint, about how things are always a little different, I forget exactly what they said.
I think about something else, and then another, and then I look down at the passenger’s seat and notice the envelope resting there, the one the woman handed me outside the diner. It’s blank and facing down, so I turn it over and notice a name printed on the front in black ink. I stare down at the letters, but they’re smudged and hard to decipher. I pull the envelope closer to my face, but the words are too jumbled to make out.
I focus on the road, then back on the envelope, and squint my eyes to see what it reads, but again, the letters spell out nothing. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the letters weren’t letters but pictographs—one of a mountain—one of a moon— one of a smaller mountain—another of a key.
I look out the window and notice a cloud float by—it’s also unsure of its shape, floating east towards a plateau in the distance. I watch it morph from one thing into another, until I look down again at the envelope and notice a word beginning to form from the smudge.
From.From, it reads.Who? I think, and then I see it. In the distance, a cloud is turning grey.M, it reads. From M.
The letter M
and suddenly I begin to cry.
And soon outside the window, the cloud begins to rain. It’s pouring over a plateau in the distance.
From M, I say aloud, and mutter it again, until I realize I’m not sure who M is, and I’m not sure why I’m crying. From M, I say again, and realize the tears keep falling, there’s no stopping them. I open the letter and read what’s written, it’s a single phrase:
Miss you, always —M
M, I repeat to myself, and fold the note over. I place it back in the envelope and fold the envelope over, and over twice more.
Who’s M? I think, searching my mind as if searching the desert for a footprint but nothing, but nothing—after some time, I give it a rest and focus back on the road. I glue my eyes to the road signs and wait for something to signal the approach of Sun City, until I see it in the distance, a sign and then a town behind it. A desert town. A mirage rising from the ground.
I step on the gas and send the car flying. Outside the windows, the clouds have cleared—the sky is the color of a clue.
A city emerges from flatness. Like floating, like falling slowly asleep.
If the town of Sun City appeared as a vision in a dream, it would most likely be a daydream, and it would most likely be a town where all the houses are the same more or less—the lawns the same hue of green, the streets aligned in the same way in each corner of the grid. At one end of town, there would be a golf course with a large water fountain at the center, a man-made lake with ducks and lily pads and reeds along the side. At the center of town, there would be a post office, and a post office employee standing outside the office waving. In the corner of his eye, there would be a reflection of a bird traveling at a few hundred feet aboveground, the bird’s vision taking in an aerial view of the scene, which reveals a town in the shape of a perfect O, a circle of houses surrounding a radial center and expanding out towards the desert in perfect symmetry. A Sun City, indeed, a town in the shape of a sun. If Sun City appeared in a dream, it would be a dream induced by the heat of the desert or induced in a state of delusion brought on from driving too many miles. If Sun City were a town in a dream, it would be a town that doesn’t make sense in the desert, too round, too green. If Sun City were a town in a dream, it would be a retirement town and all of its residents would be over the age of sixty-five. They would drive golf carts and wear similar shirts and make jokes whose punch lines ended with immediate laughter. The laughter would start violently and then trail off as everyone caught their breath. If Sun City were a town in a dream, it would be a desert town, a sleeping eye, a flattened sun. But Sun City is not a town in a dream but a town in Arizona, in the northern bounds of the Maricopa County line, just twenty miles north of Phoenix, a few miles farther from Tempe.
“Is everything all right?” a voice asks as I step out of my car into the asphalt parking lot.
A man stands at the center of the asphalt, a pair of binoculars in his hands. He’s an older man, a resident of Sun City.
“Is everything all right?” he asks again, setting the binoculars to his side. The man is heavyset, blue-eyed, reddish face. On his shirt, he has a tag that reads Parking Lot Attendant.
“I’m all right,” I say, gathering to my feet. “Just here to meet somebody.”
“Who’s that?” says the man, stepping closer.
“I’m looking for the sun,” I say. “I’m here to see Dr. Higley.”
It becomes clear that the man is a longtime resident of Sun City, a volunteer at the Visitor’s Center. He pauses for a minute, and his face becomes redder.
“Higley?” says the man. “Higley.”
“That’s right,” I say. “I believe he lives here.”
“Well, this is Source: Gizmodo