My Volcano: a sprawling apocalyptical epic and a personal catharsis

Aug 8 2022.

by Drew Rowsome -

On June 2 a mountain begins to grow in the middle of the reservoir in Central Park, New York City. At first New Yorkers are excited and fascinated but as the volcano becomes larger and larger, they grow blasé and eventually decide to monetize it with giant billboards. Except the volcano is a harbinger. All over the world mysterious events begin to unfold, linked to the volcano in some intuitive way beyond human understanding. By August the situation becomes apocalyptic.

John Elizabeth Stintzi's novel My Volcano is a sprawling epic with a massive cast of characters and a self-consciously literary structure and style. The chapters are non-linear, jumping back and forth in time, but emotionally logical. Groupings of chapters are punctuated by notations of people who have died by unnecessary violence. Victims of police shootings or hate crimes predominate, some names are brutally familiar to me, some new, but Stinzi is making a point that there are so many dead that all their names are in danger of being forgotten. Or had deaths that were ignored or brushed away. Just a few pages in, Stintzi writes:

On JUNE 13—the day after forty-nine queer people were shot in Florida, and as the height reached 514 feet—the word to captivate the country, the world, finally came. That was the day that the mountain that was growing in Central Park was determined, with a very small margin for error, to be a volcano.

The names of those who were massacred at Pulse nightclub form one of the punctuations and the rage that elicits is indeed volcanic. It is the first of many blunt metaphors.

The cast of characters in My Volcano are ordinary and anonymous as they orbit the volcano, but all extraordinary by the time Stintzi has delved into their lives. There is a homeless man, an eight-year-old Mexican boy, a filmmaker who makes commercials for a corporation that manufactures lemonade, a lesbian who works for a company that offers therapeutic sessions in screaming booths, a volcanologist, a nomadic herder, and a doctor working in a refugee camp. There is also an assortment of more fanciful characters, introduced slowly but inexorably, so that their mythological backgrounds blend into the reality of My Volcano as it departs into the surreal: a golem, a riff on Baba Yaga, and an Aztec king among them. Each character has a role to play but most also have an idea attached. The volcanologist can only connect emotionally online, the lemonade commercials have the reassuring tagline "When life gives you lemons, we have you covered." The environmental warnings could not be more blatant despite being couched in analogy and folklore.

It is an unwieldy structure that bounces from scifi to whimsy, from satire to fantasy, and includes more genres than I could keep track of. Stintzi's sure voice holds most of it together, the writing is a precise blend of poetry and journalistic grit, but I admit that by two-thirds of the way through, I was frustrated at keeping track of so many events and characters. The chaos, and the preponderance of dream states and the fantastical, became overwhelming. I didn't see how Stintzi would pull it all together, it felt as if every idea that ever passed through their head was finding its way onto the page. I put the book down in exasperation, then compulsively picked it back up. I was invested in most of the characters and my curiosity about where My Volcano was going trumped my distaste for some of the more outré flourishes. Fortunately Stintzi does pull all the disparate threads tight in a way that is emotionally but ambiguously satisfying. Just short of cathartic.

My Volcano can probably be interpreted in many ways and I suspect that everyone who reads it will have their own gut reaction. For me, the key was two characters. An academic researcher investigating the origins of a myth of a woman, or demon, who walks out of a volcano to destroy the world; and a "white trans writer" whose similarly academic project is rejected for being two supposedly incompatible threads, one science fiction, one personal memoir. The former is obvious given the title, main plot and concern for ecological sanity; the latter because Stintzi identifies as non-binary. For me My Volcano became an elaborate metaphor for rebirth and the inevitable pain and destruction involved. On a basic level, it could be seen as fusing the various myths that were co-opted to create the Jesus on the cross scenario, reframing it with an explicit queer and environmental sensibility and focus, filtered through the trans experience. That I did find cathartic.

It is the poetic aspect of My Volcano that draws one in. While it could be a beach read for its propulsiveness, the basic premise suggests a reaching for profundity, of having some elusive truth to be revealed in the prose. It is impossible not to want to dig into the multiple flows to try to extract a personal meaning. My Volcano arrives trailing comparisons to David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami, both writers that transcend their deliberately convoluted logic and dream state structures. But My Volcano reminds me more of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series where a straightforward narrative was discarded while the author worked through personal obsessions and concerns in a metaphorical manner, using any and every stylistic and literary mode, to try to express the inexpressible. And achieve a bittersweet catharsis.