Montreal author and Conundrum Press founder Andy Brown’s intelligent and experimental first novel tells the tale of a nameless narrator obsessed with his cancer (specifically, melanoma) and the benign/malignant proportions of his life. As a plague narrative, The Mole Chronicles is a ruthless examination of an individual and yet accurately mirrors our society’s current mood of fear, terror, and paranoia.

What brings this book together is the interplay of many different narratives, including those of the narrator’s sister Lesley (who also has a history of melanoma), and their father. Woven together, the stories crisscross back and forth through time and orbit around the death of the narrator’s mother.

Brown’s writing has a deft accuracy in its tone and execution. Scenes operate with a slow, film-like quality as he carefully zooms in and out of each moment. This technique is most effective at the end of the novel, when the various narrative threads collide in a devastating denouement involving all the main characters. The book’s preoccupation with death, plague, and disease haunts each page, causing a definite physical unease in reading this fiction. When Lesley cuts a malignant “blob” out of her own skin, the reader squirms at this violent act of self-mutilation like it’s a Cronenberg film.

The Mole Chronicles is a dark and sombre read and moves at a slow pace. The overall pacing and tone of the book are strengthened by the inclusion of characters like Dr. Lee and DAGWOOD, members of an absurd, Kafka-esque group of MDs who, like surreal comic book heroes, decide to blackmail the narrator into becoming an accomplice in their pursuit of social justice. Somehow – ridiculously, tragically – it all meshes together in the final few pages, in an ending that is both satisfying and uncanny.