The Silent Chord

A bleak and humorous literary novel about a scientist with synesthesia who invents an artificial fragrance to reproduce the silence of the smell of his dead mother. When Denise, his coworker, unwittingly inhales the fragrance, she must fight to stop a flood of hallucinatory artificial memories that threaten to destroy her identity. The novel explores a sad future (or the worst version of our present) in which human experience is mediated almost entirely through photographs and a few individuals who fight to live in the real.

MATTHEW KIRKPATRICK is the author of The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art (Acre) and Light Without Heat (FC2). He is a professor at Eastern Michigan University.