It’s 1985 in sunny California, in the walnut orchards near Sacramento. Galen, who is twenty-two, has the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old (if that). He aspires to be a mystic, with his starvation diet, meditation, asceticism, and focus on ridding himself of attachments. He lives with his mother, who has plenty of emotional issues; the walnut doesn’t fall too far from the tree. His grandmother has mid-stage dementia and lives in a nursing home. He is sexually obsessed with his seventeen-year-old cousin, Jennifer. There’s no dad in the picture. From an outward appearance, they look like backward hicks.

DIRT is the story of Galen’s quest for transcendence, and the consummately insane journey to get there. The family (including grandma) takes their annual trip to an old cabin in the Sierras, where conflicts over sex, money, rejection, and betrayal consummate in grave consequences. Dirt is Galen’s symbol of purification and release from suffering, or samsara, and the vital ingredient to his enlightenment. The road to hell is unpaved with inverse intentions and twisted desires.

Vann is a first-class prose writer and a unique storyteller. His book, LEGEND OF A SUICIDE: STORIES is a masterpiece, and made the list of my favorite books of all time. Also, I am a lettuce-loving, TM-practicing yogi who doesn’t take myself too seriously, so I was primed to love this irreverent, sardonic story of New Age extremism. Without a doubt, it disturbed and fascinated me in equal measure. However, I couldn’t fully connect with the characters. There’s no need for me to like them—I tend to connect and even sympathize with unlikable characters. But they were so lethally noxious and relentlessly callous that I lost interest in their fate; it became a little toilsome. This may be my own shortcoming, though. Vann is just about the edgiest contemporary storyteller I have ever read. Therefore, I await his next release with eager anticipation.