We Go Liquid

A novel of almost unmitigated bleakness, We Go Liquid mines the same vein of grim fantasy as TeBordo’s previous novels. Unfolding in the claustrophobic confines of a suburban summer vacation, it follows a 12-year-old boy through the lonely months after his mother has died. In the absence of his father, who’s asleep in the basement when he’s not at work, the boy turns to corresponding with spammers and looking to a foulmouthed local radio host for advice.

When he receives an e-mail from his mother’s old address, a standard piece of spam promising free movie tickets, he decides it’s a coded missive and responds. From a child’s-eye view, death and the Internet occupy the same unknowable ether, and he begins to piece together an understanding of his mother’s passing based on how frequently she’s given Internet access in the afterlife. The free tickets are followed by an e-mail titled “Drive her wild,” hawking the usual enlargement business, which he takes as motherly advice and orders on his dad’s credit card.

When his father gets wind of the e-mails and the useless pills, he embarks with his son on a cash-blazing campaign to order and consume every bit of Internet snake oil his dead wife’s e-mail address spits at them. The two grow closer and increasingly hopped up through their shared consumption of Canadian Zoloft, redubbed white-label snuff films, and off-brand OxyContin, while shoddy appliances flood their increasingly filthy house. When the e-mails stop coming, their deranged bonding ritual is derailed in a night of sudden violence.

The novel’s strength is in its child narrator: Through his eyes the suburb proves a strange landscape, littered with ghostly presences and forgotten places. But while he’s initially given a voice so naive it’s hard to believe he’s 12, that sweet credulity is lost to the novel’s sudden prescription drug–fueled momentum. Though We Go Liquid achieves moments of eerie magic, its episodic plotting never falls in step, and the ending is unnecessarily cruel.—Melissa Albert