Lamella by Max Halper

Mel Lane assumed his life was on the track it was supposed to be: a career with upward movement, a home, a long-term relationship. That is, until he comes home one day to a girlfriend he knows and a child he doesn't. Stranger still, no one else seems disturbed by the child’s presence—or by its bizarre, inhuman features. Mel is a reasonable man, and he knows there is a reasonable explanation—but once the veil of reality begins to ripple, the world around him becomes something he simply doesn't understand. Worse yet, it's becoming very clear that he may never have understood it quite as well as he thought he did.

He knows there are answers, written somewhere on the walls or in the airwaves, but finding them will mean confronting truths about himself and the people around him as he spirals down a rabbit hole of identity and place that will threaten to upend the delicate balance of his life.

A darkly surreal and thought-provoking story, 'Lamella' is the debut novella of American author Max Halper.

 Lamella is a debut novella that really packs a punch. It's darkly humorous, disturbing, sad, gross, unsettling, and unnerving.

Mel Lane comes home from a lousy day and finds his home life to be something out of Twilight Zone. He and his girlfriend did not have any children when he left for work and yet here she is waiting for him with this odd looking multi-holed baby and acting like it's the most normal thing in the world for him to have fathered it. Nobody else seems to think it's at all unusual so he pretty much just rolls with it because what can you do right? At first he is totally repulsed by baby Lamella but eventually she sort of grows on him. 

There is a very poignant anecdote told in this book about how as children, things just go over our heads but we pretend to get the joke, and we laugh along so as not to be left out. And that as adults perhaps we still do the same thing, pretending to understand the point of life and to know what's going on even though it still flies over our heads. That totally jibes with my first thoughts when starting this book. What the hell did I just read? As crazy as it was I enjoyed every minute of this weird and wild story. The writing flows along like a fast moving river and all you can do is just roll with it.

5 out of 5 stars

I received an advance copy for review.

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