Welcome to a new homesickness: Farsickness by Joshua Mohr

Written by Joseph Edwin Haeger

“Farsickness” was not a word I was familiar with when I first picked up Joshua Mohr’s new novella (out from House of Vlad Press). It describes a place that you long for—much in the same way you pine for home when you’re homesick—only you’ve never been to this faraway place. Basically: you’re homesick for a place you’ve never been. This is an interesting concept to explore, and I was excited to dive into Joshua Mohr’s ideas surrounding it. The books I’ve read by Mohr have been absolute knockouts. I still consider Sirens to be one of the best things I’ve read in the last decade. He takes a grounded approach and ties his stories directly back to the human condition. It’s this strong connection to lived lives that makes his writing so compelling. Even when there’s someone losing their mind, like in Some Things That Meant the World to Me, we’re still guided from an emotional core. But Farsickness is unlike the other books I’ve read by him. At the start, we’re without that immediate connection and, if I’m being completely honest, I wasn’t sure where we were going.

Hal is an Afghan war veteran, who wakes up one day to a voice in his head telling him to come home to a castle in Scotland—only he’s never been to Scotland. Even with that fact, he’s quick to listen to the voice and throw himself into the mission. When he starts the journey, we enter a fast-paced pilgrimage to get him inside the castle. He’s quickly joined by a surreal cast of characters: a little girl with a bullet hole in her face, a woman who needs to continually explode her head just so it can grow back into a normal head, and other odd friends intent on helping Hal fulfill his mission. Because the book moves so fast, I had a hard time fully grasping the human element I wanted. It’s a brisk story and it’s not until the end that we get to that grounded connection. When I put the book down, I didn’t think Mohr had made a solid enough connection for me and I was a little disappointed.

But then I woke up the next morning.

The first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes was Hal and the PTSD he was forced to live with. About how that struggle was the catalyst morphing his brain into a bizarro hellscape. We were getting an inside look at how he was trying to mentally process something that didn’t compute in his brain. How he was trying to deal with something that was incredibly difficult to deal with.

And then the next day, I woke up still thinking about Hal and how all he wanted was a normal life with his kid, but before he could achieve that dream he had to force himself into facing the horrific realities of his past. It was this futile mission that broke him because he couldn’t cope with everything he had done. At the center of this absurd tale was exactly what I had been looking for at the beginning of the book—it was there the whole time, but Mohr wasn’t hand-feeding it to me. I had to do my own work to uncover it.

Now, I don’t want to spoil anything because Farsickness builds up to a big emotional reveal and that’s the driving factor for everything that comes before it. Knowing the twist cuts the tension, so I’m not going to do anything. But before I let you go, I did want to touch on Ava Mohr, Joshua Mohr’s 9-year-old daughter who created custom illustrations for the book. Her drawings get to the root of the story and she’s able to capture his absurd and bizarre world so well. They come from an uninfluenced creative space that perfectly reflects the world Mohr has written and I love we have this visual component to complement the writing.

After days of thinking about Farsickness, I realized Joshua Mohr wrote exactly what I was hoping for—it was simply a sneaky backdoor approach. He subverted expectations while simultaneously exceeding those same expectations. I didn’t realize he encoded this story on my brain until after I’d finished the book, which really, I think might be a more impressive feat and continues Mohr’s record of being one of the more compelling writers working today.

Farsickness

By Joshua Mohr

Published by House of Vlad

140pgs, 5.0 x 8.0

Paperback: 979-8399184043 | July 2023 | $15.00

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Joseph Edwin Haeger is the author of the experimental memoir Learn to Swim (University of Hell Press, 2015) and the fiction novella, Bardo (Thirty West Publishing, 2023.) He writes fiction, essays, poetry, and screenplays. As a litmus test, he tells people his favorite movie is Face/Off, but there’s a part of him that’s afraid it’s true. He lives in the Inland PNW.