Mabry, The Who the Where and the What (2024)

J.R. Mabry, The Where, the Who & the What: A Gnostic Science Fiction Novel. Apocryphile Press, 2025. Pp. 668. ISBN 978-1-958061-92-3. $24.99 pb/$0.99 e.

Reviewed by Don Riggs

Mabry’s The Where, the Who & the What: A Gnostic Science Fiction Novel is an uncomfortable delight for those fascinated by Gnosticism and opens the portals to that mystical perspective for science fiction readers as well. I am both, and found the novel to be gripping the entire length of its 654 pages of text; the Author’s Note at the end was a fitting coda placing the experience I had just gone through in a biographical context. Seth St. John is a protagonist who could be expected to say, with Shakespeare’s Romeo, “I am fortune’s fool!” as he has been saddled with a crazy-making world view from his parents, whose church epitomizes institutional toxicity. Indeed, the reader may wonder why he keeps trying to deal with his mother, who seems to deny the fact that her husband has been dead for years. Seth has OCD; perhaps he keeps trying because he feels duty-bound to support her as an only child with a fundamentalist upbringing.
To those familiar with Gnosticism, their unnamed “church” accepts the Gnostics’ understanding of the demiurge—the Creator who claims to be God, but who in fact has brought into existence the physical world and all that is on it to keep the souls of humans in bondage to that demon. It turns out, much later in the novel, that this demonic spirit is dependent upon a diet of sacrificial humans for its continued existence, and in order to enact this sacrifice a portion of California has been reproduced within an enormous space ship named Cibus Dei, or Meal of God. Most of the inhabitants of this ship are not aware that they are not on Earth, much in the way that the film The Truman Show keeps Truman in ignorance of this fact, except that in this case, it is not only one person, but all of the humans there who buy into this illusion. Only a few of the very highest-level people seem to be aware of this fact, many of them the elite group of electricians who can go into “the behind” to make necessary repairs. (“The behind” is analogous to an aspect of the world in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, where Wednesday—Gaiman’s Odin character—takes the protagonist Shadow off the highway they have been driving on into an interstitial realm behind but not readily accessible to people in the world of consensus reality.)

Seth stumbles into a Lodge of Gnostics who are also aware of this situation, and who are planning to take some sort of action to prevent the demon “God” from its meal; however, they are constantly in danger of discovery by those who are religious in the conventional sense—conventional from the point of view of the worshippers of the demon god. Seth is seen as being exceptionally pure, albeit shackled by the neuroses created by his toxic upbringing. He is like Parzival, the “pure fool” who is both innocent and equipped with an eidetic memory. This quality helps him in his day job, which is at a book store, and makes him valuable to the Gnostics in their plans to penetrate “the behind” and subvert the operation of the spacecraft on its sacrificial journey. His best friend, a lesbian named Angie who owes him for his helping her to emerge from the grief of the death by overdose of a lover—and from heroin addiction herself—wants to save him from what she sees as a cult. In addition, Seth’s girlfriend Becky is distraught by the sudden personality shift she sees in him as well, and the two attempt to stage an intervention. This backfires terribly, and Seth leaves them.

Obviously, there is a great deal of activity going on here on multiple layers, and there seems to be no character who is not flawed. At first it seems like the Gnostics act on much higher ideals than anyone else in the novel, but flaws on their part emerge in the unfolding of the plot. One of the highest points in the novel is the final breaking of the seal for the gnostic initiates, which is an orgy the likes of which rivals that depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. The reader is led to see this as a positive breakthrough for Seth, who has had difficulty with his sexual relationship to Becky, and as it is described, it appears to be a spiritual experience as well. However, nothing is as it appears to be.

This is a novel about illusion, and the illusory quality of perception on all the levels of the presented world extends to Seth’s private experience and ultimately to the cosmic nature of the situation. Although there is no “orthodox” version of Gnosticism, many Gnostics might object to various depictions of the Gnostic Lodge, their rituals, and their relationship to other members of the society in the world as it is presented on its journey through space. Mabry, in his Author’s Note at the end, reveals that in this novel he is working with his own toxic religious upbringing, and that writing the novel has been an act of cathartic self-transformation. It serves a similar function for the reader who takes such matters to heart, just as, for example, certain works of Philip K. Dick and a film of one of them by Richard Linklater may bring the reader/viewer through such a catharsis.