the book of webs

by Jesse Kohn

Word spreads from one recovering self-inflicted eye surgery patient to the next of a mystical book capable of overturning the Burlingtonian empire.

Captivating and devious, the book of webs is constructed out of misremembered fragments, conflicting histories, and secrets whispered in the darkness. The insurgents tell of an enemy so powerful it owns the air, dictates reality, and has even managed to co-opt their thoughts. Their only hope is to conspire with the uprisings of their slips of the tongue, excretions, tics, bad hair days, and, most importantly, their dreams.

In this darkly comic and inventive debut novel, Jesse Kohn introduces a network of shape-shifters and misfits. A militant priestess broods over orphaned angel eggs. A post-punk band animates a messianic homunculus made of belly button lint. A failed dream journalist goes on a terrible first date to heaven. Each misadventure is a chapter in a book devised to oppose the despotic order of their enemy—the book of webs.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction

428 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2023

About the author

Jesse Kohn is a writer of books and songs from Santa Fe, NM. He is the non-fictional human representative of the anti-reality interspecies revolutionary collective disguised as a novel called *the book of webs*. He lives with his dog Roy and his wife Sam, and works as a bartender at a bar manned exclusively by men with mustaches. At 5'6", he is the smallest of these men.

Reviews

[Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

in the acknowledgments kohn describes this book as “essentially a 420-page-long typo” which I put first because I do think it's better than any concise description of this book that I've managed to come up with. this book is bizarre. I finished it about a month and a half ago but I've been waiting to write this because I genuinely didn't know what to say about it. I still don't, really. how do you talk about a book where the setting, plot, pov, characters, and meanings of words change constantly, often mid-sentence?
the book of webs is a book. this is one of the only confident statements I can make about it. that being said, according to the book of webs, by book I could mean, variously, "the state's housing system", "a substance or intensity one's body particularly excelled in uncontrollably excreting", "the vast borderland ... between the organism and the environment", "an abstract extrapolation of its own relationally entwined untelling", or " a technology ... like a boat". at one point a character says, "That's what I mean by the word book. Like when you repeat something I say with a question mark, and then I explain what I meant, and you tell me that that doesn't make sense and I keep talking anyway ...”. this is what I mean when I say that the book of webs is a book.
despite this, the page-to-page experience of reading the book of webs is a lot of fun. which is a real technical achievement on kohn's part because the page-to-page experience is also usually very confusing. for a long section near the end there's a character that uses "i/me" pronouns, which is to say that any other character describing my actions speaks about me in the first person. like that. and it's almost not unreadable, which is, frankly, impressive. I found that when I let the book sort of wash through me without trying to link up all the pieces I had a better time. and it got funnier. it was mostly an aesthetic experience – I found that the visual touchstones that recurred throughout (cave, spider, snake, city, animal masks, puppet, medical conference, etc.) were vivid enough to ground the story inside the more mutable narratives.
much of the content of the book of webs has not stuck with me. but the thread that lingers is the persistent ability in the book for characters to communicate with parts of a body – to talk to a knee, or a cowlick, or a tongue. the body is a committee, and it plays off of the multiple meanings of body because the body is often a book, and so the book (the book of webs) is a committee too. the soul of the body (narrator of the book) has been dedifferentiated, and the body (book) is running through consensus (writing itself). or something I guess. that or this book is the hallucinatory ramblings of a man with no eyes sitting in a cave. or a puppet made of spiders. made by spiders. god is here. he wants to talk to you on the phone. he wants to know: is the whole thing about the book being 420 pages long a four twenty joke? and if so – why?

[Yancy Eaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first introduction to this book came upon hearing Eden Kupermintz and Langdon Hickman review it for the Death // Sentence podcast. All those two ever read is the weirdest of the weird shit, so hearing how enamored and impressed by the strangeness & originality from Kohn immediately prompted me to purchase the book and abandon all responsibility as soon as it arrived so that I could fully immerse myself in it.

In three words: Weird, strange, bizarre. Structurally, it’s truly unlike anything I’ve ever read before but in the best way. Fever dream. I felt unsettled reading but that wasn’t a deterrent. In fact, I felt compelled to lean into that feeling and explore it. It’s intricate, subversive, and incredibly creative and fun. I found myself giggling and smiling and taking pictures of certain excerpts so that I could reference them later in random conversations. “I see you’ve met my snapping turtle.”

I flew through this book in just a few days and genuinely enjoyed vacillating back and forth between having a firm grasp of what was going on and being completely clueless. The degrees of interconnectedness made this such a joy to read and I will be recommending this to friends for you years.

Hell of a debut.

[helaas pindakaas]

I can’t rate this book as it literally transcends the goodreads rating scale. It was an out of body experience. It took months to finish, and the whole time I was reading I could feel neurons rearranging in my brain. Did I like it? I have no idea. Do I recommend it? YES.

[Winter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am entirely enamored with this book.

While the story may not make much sense at first glance, I do believe that things only make as much sense as we allow them to. As a person who does not make a lot of sense for much of the time, I also find myself uniquely situated in that this book and I have reached a mutual understanding, if not a sensical one.

I feel it also necessary to mention that at the time of reading this, I became so invested that I was taking notes on all of the characters and events in an effort to make connections between the web that constructs this book. It got to the point where I spoke to all of my friends (and even some acquaintances) about the events in the story in an attempt to piece everything together and spread some of the joy that reading this gave me.

An experience like no other, this book truly deserves to be read.

[Olivia Dance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps one of the best books I have ever read! I was initially so skeptical of this book and it was quite hard to really solidly get into, but once I did it built itself up in such an incredible way. No matter what you think of this book it is such an indescribable feat of creativity that it should get all the stars just for that. But it builds into an incredible treatise on reading, literacy, relationships, interconnection, institutional structures, and what it means to think and experience and engage with the world. I love rereading books and I can’t wait to reread this one :))

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

engaged w/ here: https://5cense.com/24/1157.htm