Out today from Autumn House Press, Myth of Pterygium by Diego Gerard Morrison—a debut novel—describes a Mexico city that is “visceral and tactile” through a prose “razor sharp,” according to reviewer Mark Daniel Taylor. Read Taylor’s full review below!
In the same way that a person tries to wink the remnants of a hangover out of their eyes the first thing in the morning, Diego Gerard Morrison’s debut novel, Myth of Pterygium, opens with a morse-code like awakening. Published by Autumn House Press, the book opens with chapters which are only blinking at first, structured in small bursts as the narrator describes to the reader the encroaching of the eponymous pterygium on the surface of their eye, the conjunctivitis threatening to cloud his vision if not seen to soon. Set in a version of Mexico City which is teetering on the edge of violence and environmental decay, the narrator—referred to jokingly by his wife as “Arthur,” in reference to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, but who otherwise goes unnamed—is likewise caught on the edge of several precipices: a wife who is pregnant with their daughter, the publication of a book he is editing for a Would-Be-Writer, and potential financial ruin.
