B.F. Späth’s The Sun Temple follows one vulnerable and unstable man’s quest for antiquarian visions in this elegant, lyrical, obsessive, and hallucinogenic story. The tale is “a short story, but with gland trouble” filled with metafictional ploys à la Thomas Pynchon, and it serves as a “Travelogue of a Non-Existent City…[, a] Poem of a Skeletal Metropolis…[, and an] Essential Guidebook for the Great Masses of the Unemployed.”

The tale is a tour of old New York City as seen through the haze of cannabis. The great, tumultuous city is a suffocating grid, a hedge-maze, and a labyrinth, navigated day in and day out by an unmoored psyche who sees himself as martyr and prophet, worshipper of the sun and christ. In turns euphoric and melancholy, self-flagellating and self-aggrandizing, the unnamed narrator’s disturbing dreams and inner-thoughts are explored in a way that echoes William S. Burroughs. Jack Kerouac’s more unhinged form of stream of consciousness and personal spiritual experimentalism is evident on the page; the fragmentation, repetition, and off-the-wall journey harken back to Kurt Vonnegut.

That the narrator is unstable is not the point. No, it is the experience that is the point. Filled with an emphasis on colour, reflection, and digression, The Sun Temple is a postmodern work with all the highlights of the greats from that era of literature. At its heart is a fractured, addled mind’s de-construction and re-construction of a single, hypnotic place: The Battery.

Recommended for fans of postmodern, experimental literature that reads like a cross between an acid trip and a cannabis haze.