Here's a novel that I'd love to see adapted into a movie, but only if someone could get it right and I don't feel that's particularly likely. If 'The Naked Lunch' could be deemed unfilmable because of its non-linear narrative, then how could this be filmed, given that I'm still not sure how much of it actually happens in our world and how much is the result of an intense psychedelic trip. There are clearly sections that don't really happen, because characters die or are shot in one chapter, only to reappear completely fine in another. However, I don't know where the boundaries are, beyond one chapter being so hilariously stereotypical that it's clearly a psychedelic cartoon.

There are two primary plot strands that eventually join. The most grounded follows a mycologist called Sarah on a quest into the Pamogo Forest in the very northern reaches of California to bring back spores she can use to grow her own supply of a highly psychedelic mushroom called the King's Breakfast. She's a pre-op trans woman, though I initially thought she was female, and her guide in the forest is male, Andy by name, who calls himself an interpretive specialist. He's really a sort of teacher who works for the park service, his speciality being local history and a tragic figure called Lazarus Sloane, whose efforts to harvest the forest for lumber went wildly wrong.

And we can soon see why. The Pamogo Forest is a character of its own here, one that's so known to mess with the heads of visitors that it even has an associated disorder: PCS, or Pamago Catatonia Syndrome. Sarah needs Andy, because compasses don't work inside the forest and he navigates by corpses that are never retrieved. Local native tribes believe that the forest is alive and Chapter 0 introduces us to a creature called the Lord of the Forest. Andy's list of precautions includes doses of a mushroom called Leviathan's Favored Son, which wipes the most recent memories, so that, in a worst case scenario where they're lost mentally, they can take that to undo the damage.

The other plot strand is notably wilder and it features a feminist cult housed deep in the forest in Lazarus Sloane's long lost lumber mill. They're called the Sisters of the Green Lady and they're led by her divine prophet, Mother Moonflow, a grotesque naked woman who wet nurses raccoons and is kept perpetually high on mushrooms to maintain constant contact with the Green Lady. All the Sisters are female except for Pickles, who they consider male, even though his manhood has been surgically removed. None use their given names, so we encounter Hell Slut, Skillet, Miss Trix, Doc Clopper, Sunny Delight and others. Many, like Virginia Dentata, Marsha Mallow and Captain Beef Curtains, sound like drag names.

From one angle, this plays out similarly to another recent trans horror novel, 'Manhunt', with the world we visit roughly divided between TERFs (the Sisters, who are radically feminist but consider trans women to be male, or "phallic alecs") and trans people (Sarah; Madeleine, the post-op lady who sent her into the forest; and, by extension, Andy, who's firmly male but a trans ally). Men are generally kept at a distance and dismissed as lesser. When Mother Moonflow sends some Sisters on an assassination mission to ensure that an upcoming birthing ceremony can work, we see their targets as a cartoon town of stereotypical trigger happy macho cops.

However, the overall effect is very different to 'Manhunt'. It's much weirder for a start, but oddly also better grounded and far more fun. It's also much less bitchy, as if Bitter Karella was writing a bona fide novel rather than using a fictional story as the framework to rant their agenda towards us. Everything has a purpose, however outrageous. Every character and group has a reason to be here and to see the world the way they do. They're all working towards positive goals, from their perspectives, even if they don't seem positive to us. The TERFs are painted as deeply as any other characters, escapees from a dangerous world crafting a "sanctuary away from the world of men", rather than one issue caricatures. Even their frequent orgies make sense.

The other obvious comparison isn't to other trans horror novels like 'Brainwyrms', which is ickier and more deliberately deviant than this, but to other books that are creating a new subgenre in horror that's focused on mushrooms. While there are certainly antecedents going back to stories by William Hope Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft, with more recent examples by Harry Adam Knight and Brian Lumley, I suddenly seem to be reviewing mycohorror monthly, including books like 'The Ghost Woods' by C. J. Cooke, 'The Girl in the Creek' by Wendy N. Wagner and 'Mexican Gothic' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. These are four very different novels with a similar approach to fungi. What primal fear are these authors tapping into and is there something creating a zeitgeist here?

Karella's take on mushrooms is primarily psychedelic and it flavours this novel so deeply that it's a real challenge to find the base reality within it. Given what we know about the Pamogo Forest, it seems fair to suggest that you wouldn't need to actually ingest something to be affected by what grows in it. It's presumably enough to just spend time there, unless you're wearing a hermetically sealed bunny suit with its own oxygen supply. We have to see the Sisters, who live in the forest, as chemically changed; the longer they're there, the less grounded in reality they become. Even the visitors are affected. Sarah samples the King's Breakfast in one of Madeleine's places, so she has been changed before she even gets to the forest, while Andy is a frequent guide.

This effect presumably had an impact on another important character who doesn't actually show up in the story itself. He or she is T. F. Greengarb, who compiled a fictional 'Field Guide to Common Mushrooms of the Pamogo Forest' in 1978. Whenever we hear about a new mushroom, we hear its technical Latin name along with its imaginative English version, presumably taken from this field guide, from Thief's Luck (Lepiota jinx) and Slug Shanties (Phallaceae strigilis) to Blood Sapphires (Agrocybe sanguines) and Jizz Bombs (Agaricus abominatio).

Excerpts from this book precede the majority of chapters and they get wilder and wilder as it runs on, as if Greengarb has quested too deep into the forest and become affected by what they were researching. I want to read the field guide in isolation, along with other fictional books conjured up here, like the similarly increasingly unhinged 'Diary of Lazarus Sloane' and the mimeographed pamphlet called 'Shining Clitopia: The Way of the Green Lady' that serves as the manifesto of the Sisters. I love fictional books anyway, but these are richly mined, as are some of the backgrounds provided for various cultists, which underline the humour that's riddled through the novel.

I haven't read anything by Bitter Karella before, though they've been a Hugo finalist three times as fan writer. They describe themselves as a genderfluid transvestite goblin" who writes "gonzo psycho-sexual body horror", which rings very true here. Their pronouns change apparently on the fly, so I could presumably use he/his, her/her or they/them without ever being wrong. That seems unusual and provocative and it fits the mindset of this book wonderfully.

It's a trip, above all, that questions our perception of reality. We can easily fathom coherent plot here, but how much of it actually happens and how much is affected by what we personally bring to it? Is it appropriate to imagine some of it as live action but some of it as a liquescent cartoon? And how far was Karella's tongue planted in their cheek when they were writing it? I found it to be a joyous and transgressive riot. I enjoyed it more than 'Manhunt' and 'Brainwyrms' put together. ~~ Hal C F Astell