Overview

In the Verdant Polis of Chlorophyllia - a solar-powered, bioengineered utopia of algae towers, consensus governance, and licensed psychedelics - a lean, dark-eyed healer from the arid margins arrives with something the wellness system cannot catalogue. His name is Solander Kael. He is thirty-one years old. He is gathering children. Twelve boys, ages thirteen to seventeen. Girls with histories the integration system has smoothed over but not erased. A cohort of beautiful, damaged, misanthropic young people who see the paradise they were born into for what it is: a machine for the management of the human animal, perfected and humming and profoundly, quietly wrong. Around this circle of the young and the broken, Solander moves - healing the unhealable, releasing the possessed, feeding thousands in the unmanaged margins, and teaching in parables that cut beneath the Verdant consensus like a knife beneath the skin of something living. The Verdant Gospel is a magickal working in sixteen stations. Composed through the collision of five literary voices - the pharmacological surrealism of Burroughs, the cut-technique transmissions of Gysin, the death-lit precision of Mishima, the exquisite cosmic dread of Ligotti, and the grounded propulsive weight of Brown - it retells the Gospel of Luke entire, event by event, miracle by miracle, parable by parable, transposed into a future that has solved every material problem and none of the essential ones. Beneath it runs the controversial scholarship of Dr. D.C.A. Hillman, whose research into the entheogenic foundations of ancient Mediterranean religious practice restores to the healing accounts, the exorcism narratives, and the Eucharistic ritual their original pharmacological substrate. What the canonical text calls the Holy Spirit, this text calls by its botanical name. The children are flawed. Their beliefs are sometimes monstrous, shaped by unsupervised encounters with compounds the Substance Review Council has not approved. Solander himself is not always kind, not always clean, not always clearly distinguishable from the charismatic sociopaths the historical record has produced in abundance. The Verdant Polis is genuinely beautiful and genuinely a prison. None of these contradictions are resolved. This book is a story. It is also an operation performed upon the reader. Handle accordingly.

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