Red Arrow

Needing the work, a writer whose early promise has dimmed agrees to ghostwrite the memoir of a celebrated physicist. Debt weighs on him, his marriage to an artificial intelligence designer has grown cold, and a persistent dread he calls the Mist follows him everywhere. When the physicist disappears, the narrator's career, finances, and grip on his own mind are all thrown into uncertainty.

Hoping for relief, he submits to an experimental psychedelic treatment. Afterward, happiness fills his days, and he begins to see his own life within a much larger frame. His memories and his future seem to bend, split, and open up before him.

The novel moves from a chemical spill in West Virginia to Silicon Valley, from an art studio in Brooklyn to a fast train through rural Italy. It descends into the darker corners of the mind and then rises into a world that feels bright, wondrous, and newly made.