An enjoyable read, well written and entertaining. Hadn't read this author before but would consider reading again.

Thank you NetGalley and Atmosphere Press for this ebook.


I thought that this one was hard to follow and the first part really caught my attention and then went downhill from there. It tended to be repetive at times also.

As a pharmacist, I had to get this for the title alone. The description sounded great and the first few chapters really grabbed me. Then it slowly devolved into a repetitive and aimless mess with characters whose motivations made no coherent sense. There were a handful of beautiful sentences scattered throughout to warrant a bump up to 2 stars.

I would love to compare reactions to this book pre, during and post Trump’s presidency. Not going to lie - it’s kind of a weird book. The characters are not altogether likeable or relatable but you can’t help buying in to their lives and ideas. The book tricks you into thinking it is Americana only to turn on its head and leave you holding the loose ends of a frayed cord, defying classification. Ultimately, I really enjoyed the book and recommend it. It will make you think and make you question and this is great. The writing style will also impress - quite unique and oddly appealing.

This was…. Not good. It was disjointed and hard to follow. Aside from the “assuming dad’s identity” plot, nothing in the blurb (which is what got me hyped about this book) showed up until about 60% of the way into the book. None of the individual threads of the plot were anything more than loosely smushed together into an imitation of a knot. I got the feeling that this was supposed to be in the vein of a Chuck Palahnuik novel, but it was just too messy to even come close.

Garin Cycholl’s RX wrestles with the complexity of personal responsibility.

After his father’s death, the narrator absconds from the funeral with his fathers identity and, more importantly, his medical license. After taking up residence in a small town called Assumption, we’re introduced to an eclectic cast of characters who, while relatable, aren’t very likable. “Do no harm” is often a phrase repeated throughout the book as the narrator thinks about his own responsibility to the people he cares for in the town who believe he is a doctor, but the logic can apply to everyone and the implications their lies and actions bring upon each other.

Through out the novel, there is a thread of terrorist bombings around major cities, and the narrator can’t help but wonder if one of his patients is connected. Skeggs spends most of his check-ups preaching his radical politics to the narrator, but it’s unclear if he’s sick or just a hypochondriac, a harmless conspiracy theorist or a domestic terrorist. This often hits a little too close to home with the modern political climate, but the need to know how this would play out seemed to be the driving force of the plot.

Overall, the story felt a bit disjointed as we moved from the narrator’s motivations, his patient’s problems, and terrorism. It was unclear why the narrator decided to take his father’s identity. We get a glimpse of his tumultuous childhood when he’s separated from his mother who struggles with addiction and moves in with his father, stepmother and half-brother, but it doesn’t feel like we have a full picture. If we knew a bit more, the narrator’s motivations might have been more clear.

Received digital ARC from Netgalley for an honest review

I wanted to like this book. I tried to like this book. I kept reading with the hope that it would get better…that the plot would actually take off….it did not. The ARC copy I received had numerous typos and incomplete sentences in the first half, but even in their absence I couldn’t recommend this. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a fan of poetry, but this just wasn’t a writing style I could appreciate.

in gary cycholl's rx, a man assumes his deceased father's identity and medical license, skipping town after the funeral to drive across the country and disappear into one of the many holes in contemporary society that lost souls slip through. in a small town named assumption, he encounters a cast of appropriately kooky characters; meanwhile, someone is planting bombs in major american cities. this story of personal and national grief—and of one man taking the dictum "physician, heal thyself" a little too seriously—asks salient questions, but sacrifices readability for a thematic diffuse quality, a prose full of holes, that never quite comes together the way it needs to.

the big problem here is exemplified by the book's selling copy. "A patient comes to you with vague but troubling symptoms. He seems to know a little too much about the odd sickness you’ve seen in other patients lately. You start to wonder what he’s been up to in his chicken coop. Is he growing the next plague? Should you call the FBI? The only problem is that you’re not really a doctor." — this is great! but the "odd sickness in other patients" doesn't really appear until 2/3s of the way into the book. to that point, i as a reader found myself meandering through the pages wondering when a clear direction would reveal itself. and of course this is a novel about meandering: our narrator is between identities, between places, trying faces on and then shuffling them off again. that's all well and good, but the narrator is so intangible, the scenes so fragmented and few between, especially in the first half, and the style so disjointed, that there's no real hook for the reader to latch onto and be pulled forward by. there's no there there, as they say, except for maybe the theoretical or critical implications. unfortunately man cannot live on theoretical or critical implications alone.

on the topic of style—i made a note to myself that there's only about three real scenes as part of the present action of the novel in the first seventy or so pages of the novel. the author is a poet, which makes sense. the prose is disjunct in a way that reminds us of the protagonist's dissociation from his family, his past, and a normative attitude toward society (i.e. committing medical and identity fraud), but it makes for a laboured reading experience, jumping between sentences that feel like non-sequiturs even when they're not, fighting against a current of imagery that cannot be imagined, piecing together the occasionally tortured grammar:

"How does a sexologist train? Chats with a string of locked-up deviants or a peek into deeper but closed suburban wounds? I imagined sitting across from my corps of deviants in a little, gray room, not blinking as they unwound their abdominal nerves in ceaseless tingles.”

"The radio was abuzz with the latest atrocity. Somebody had blown up a little piece of Disney—set off a bomb in Space Mountain in the park’s busiest season. Mora watched the video on my laptop—smoke poured from emergency exits as doors flew open along the rides and shows; first responders with bodies strapped onto rolling stretchers, flashing lights.”

"I took the long way to Mora’s place after a late afternoon thunderstorm. Water coursing through ditches. The world immediate and awhirl with moving substance. I reconsidered the bacteria that Mora and I’d made common to one another. Who was I, she? Who was I to see these things?”

it's frustrating because when the action does come together, for example in the sort-of-climactic chapter with the horse, it really does gel—the absurd humour, the oddball characters, the askew authorial eye, all of it. but otherwise unfortunately this one never quite took flight for me.

i would recommend rx to readers who enjoy staccato, improbable prose; thoughtful engagement with our contemporary apocalypse; a slow traipse toward small and large disasters. not my cup of tea, but maybe yours!

thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the ARC.

review also posted to goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4502554270

Rx started out as a book about inheritance - Rex leaves town, avoiding his half-brother, taking only his recently deceased father's prescription pad, antique medical tools, and his name.

The book pivots into paranoia as Rex settles into a small town and sets up practice.
Will other doctors sniff him out?
Will his nurse/lover relapse into addiction?
Who is bombing sites around the country?
Is immigration coming for Michelle?
Is Skaggs infected with a new plague?

Various storylines are left unresolved, like real life, and the uncertainty of these times. I leave it up to you, Dear Reader, to determine the ending.

Where do you begin to stop a country from bleeding? Can you make a difference by healing or failing to heal it one person at a time?

If you play at being a doctor…

The narrator grew up in a broken household, his dad seducing the nurses at the hospital and his mom out of sight. After his father’s death, he sets out to figure out who he is – both in comparison to his father and without his father – while reading up on medicine in outdated books. He reinvents himself as his old man and impersonates being a doctor in a small town full of eccentric but normal and not very likable people, including himself.

Despite the fact that he is not trained for it – nor does he pursue training or study effectively – he does his best to do no harm and offers a listening ear to his patients. He somewhat passively absorbs what is happening in the world around him and is not very passionate about anything. He is lost without a fixed place of residence, occupation, and identity. “What do you live for, Doctor Rex? Maybe it’s just that we die for something.”

Fix the world one person at a time

The world around him is a real mess, with people being found dead, bombings and political struggles. Stories about these events are interspersed with stories about his medical practice. The way his days are described also illustrates his disturbed life and world. The chapters are short, with his personal encounters structured like the events happening around him. One wonders if his impersonation will help him make something of himself.

What I found so impressive about this book is how the conditions of the narrator’s patients begin to reflect the state of the country, a state very reminiscent of what is happening in the real world right now. When he sees his patients, it’s like he’s watching the news.

Skaggs on eggs

Everything the narrator goes through slowly leads him to one of my favorite scenes: the egg-influenced Skaggs on his horse. The scenes the narrator shares with Blackwater and Major Skaggs are always very entertaining. Regardless of the likability of their personalities, they make you think beyond the most visible aspects of the story in Rx, such as how the way many people live their lives is different from being a hostage. The depth of the story increases toward the end. There is no climax or exciting plot, but you feel the control slipping away from the characters. The last page of the book marks a good time to return to the life you hope you can influence. Even if it’s just one person at a time.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Atmosphere Press for an advanced copy of this new literary thriller.

The problem with reading a novel about in which an unnamed narrator crisscrosses a flailing and failing nation riven by terrorism, religiosity and just stupid, all while trying to either find himself or lose himself even deeper in the world of the big lie, is that it seems more like reading Twitter than fiction. In other words Rx: A Novel by Garin Cycholl hits way to close to home.

Our narrator has just watched the decline and death of his father, a doctor of some repute, though a Goldwater fan, so he's not perfect. With a family he is not close with, and nothing really to believe in, he hits the road with a trunk full of his father's medical equipment, medical degrees and blank prescription pads, traveling to no particular place. At the same time America is under attack from within as terrorist attacks, religious militias and other things America does so well fil the news. And a strange new disease makes its appearance.

The book is very well written, with many allusions both to history, literature and other subjects filling the pages. Some of the terror attacks will seem familiar, as if the past always seems to come around again. The characters are not stereotypes of conspiracists, more like that weird uncle or the neighbor who has a whole lot of flags hanging in their yard, none that anyone can identify. They all seem to be looking for something, the narrator maybe finding a purpose, others trying to find anything better than the hand they were dealt.

The book is hard to categorize. A road novel on the highway to hell, just seems to pat. Fight Club but without the organizational skills. You don't like the characters but you can understand them. And I am not sure when it was written but it seems very prescient about events today. Disturbing but very interesting, with quite a few things that I know will stay with me.