The Idiot’s Garden
Purchase BookA jungle has overgrown the toxic remnants of a far-gone world, leaving the mysteries of the reviving Earth to those transmuted by time. A boy named Seed overcomes a terminal illness after eating a fish infested with forever chemicals. His friend Bike struggles to reconcile the present with the fragmented memories of his seemingly endless past. And Peloria, a double-minded hybrid who speaks a language of her own, searches for the meaning of her singular existence. Together, they navigate the frontier of a post-apocalyptic world and the strange power that threatens to eliminate the last humans. In this work of experimental fiction, the line between poetry and prose is as blurred as that between human and non-human, vine and power line, leaf and data chip. The only way to survive in this new world is not only to overcome one’s past, but to dissolve the boundaries of flesh itself.
“The Idiot’s Garden is a fever dream of orphic metamorphosis, set in a universe in which everything emits its own song. From vignettes to fables, poems to stories, parables to flights of fancy, the novel chants and reenchants our sense of the possible. This is fiction at its most phosphorescent, and it quests to do nothing less than lyrically resurrect the world anew.” —Will Cordeiro, author of Whispering Gallery
“Incredibly strange and beautiful, The Idiot's Garden is filled with inventive prose portraying a new phase of nature long after climate catastrophes have altered all life forever. The small group of characters (Bike, Seed, Peloria, and Nameless) will break your heart. It's best to go into the book without knowing too much, because the surprises are marvelous.” —Ivy Grimes, author of Glass Stories
"Kyle E. Miller is a wizard of words. Everything becomes sacred under his poetic gaze. What a joy it is to be surprised, delighted, baffled, moved to tears, and gently challenged by a book both rigorous in its beauty and unrepentant in its defiance of traditional Western literary structure." —Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and Invaginies
"Under a 'screen of bird noises,' the startling territory of Miller's novel churns to ‘rough music, a bouncing, creeping rhythm, 'spun by that spooky action which animates M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract, Joanna Russ's Paradise, and Samuel R. Delany's Bellona. Out of the accretion of difference—'acting not as glue, but as the acid that moves and releases'—what will we learn? And with which of our parts?" —Zebulon House, author of The Psychic Surgeon Assists
Publication date: Sept. 27, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-962004-05-3
