Review: "Found Audio" by N. J. Campbell

One good thing I have found out as I have grown older is my openness toward new forms of storytelling continues to grow. If I had read N. J. Campbell’s debut novel Found Audio when I was 25 instead of 30, I’m quite sure I would not have liked as I much as I did. I don’t think I would give myself a chance to understand its ambiguity, its originality or its beating heart underneath its off-putting syntax and strange story structure. I’m finding myself okay with questions not being an answered and mysteries left unsolved, in both the books and movies I consume as well as the life I live and despite its small, swift 140 page length, that is exactly what this book tries to convey through it’s  mystical, sometimes dreadful and always enlightening story that is sure to invite comparisons to House of Leaves, the Patient Zero of the Russian Nest Doll Novel, with the initial narrative level being us, the reader, which keeps us questioning through the book’s many forms what role we play in the story, if everything, fiction and not fiction, we experience we are either dreaming or being dreamt of. Like Danielewski, Campbell puts himself in the story’s second level, claiming to have been assigned to edit the manuscript as an undergrad and he, in an almost unwilling gesture, introduces us to the third layer of storytelling , concerning historian  Amrapali Singh whose specialty is analyzing audio recordings with laser-like precision. She is handed a heft sum of money when a strange man drops off a series of recordings at her Alaskan office to be transcribed. This introduces us to the fourth level of the story, which concerns what is found on the recordings. The three that are presented to us are recorded by an unnamed American journalist, where he discusses his quest to find the “City of Dreams” a kind of nebulous entity that can mean many different things, can be in any number of places around the world and seems overwhelmingly impossible to find. The first section follows him to the bayou where he is writing an article about a snake hunter of mythic proportions named Otha Jackson. What begins simply enough quickly devolves into a fever dream of the journalist’s deepest desires, flashbacks to his time with his ex Bianca and a total absence of temporal logic. The second recording follows him to the stacked city of Kowloon before its fall. It deepens his search for this city that has an infinite number of names and lads him into the deserts of South Africa, where his reality is even more fractured and lands him in the hospital. The final section follows the journalist to Turkey to cover a legendary chess player who he has seen in his dreams. This section, the book’s best, offers the most concrete insight into this book’s strange logic, where the chess player might be a being greater than God or the devil, and reveals a truth the journalist may have known all along. It’s hard to out the bizarre nature of this book into words, it perfects its dream logic, existing on that ethereal edge between sleep and wakefulness, fantasy and reality. It casts an oddly satisfying spell and I’m better for having fallen under it. 

Rating: 5/5