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“With the ear of a poet and the eye of a neuroscientist, Hoel pioneers a new marriage between the enchantments of literature and the challenges of modern brain science.”
-DAVID EAGLEMAN, neuroscientist at Stanford, bestselling author of Sum and Livewired
“I have been writing and reading daily for decades, and I have never read anything like Erik Hoel’s remarkable debut novel.The Revelations is a deeply compelling, thought-provoking, and frankly, unforgettable work, one that heralds the arrival of an important new voice among us.”
​–ANDRE DUBUS III, author of House of Sand and Fog, an Oprah's Book Club selection
“Sex. Death. Rioting in the streets and aggressive self-lobotomy; brains in vats and the nature of consciousness itself. Dense, literary, and hallucinogenic, The Revelations is an impassioned argument over beers and amphetamines. It will be stuck in my brain for some time to come.”
​–PETER WATTS, Hugo-award-winning author of Blindsight and Starfish
“The Revelations is a fascinating invitation to link minds with a brilliant neuroscientist and take part in a daring literary thought experiment.” 
​–SOPHIE WARD, Booker-longlisted author of Love and Other Thoughts Experiments
“Erik Hoel has crafted an audacious literary thriller. The Revelations is hilarious and deeply serious, heady and carnal and intellectual, all at once.” ​
​–CATHERINE CHUNG, author of The Tenth Muse, fiction editor of Guernica magazine

​The Revelations is here


​​An edgy and ambitious debut about neuroscience, death, and the search for the theory of human consciousness, by a powerful new voice in contemporary literary fiction.​
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Overlook Press
Monday, Kierk wakes up. Once a rising star in neuroscience, Kierk Suren is now homeless, broken by his all-consuming quest to find a scientific theory of consciousness. But when he’s offered a spot in a prestigious postdoctoral program, he decides to rejoin society and vows not to self-destruct again. Instead of focusing on his work, however, Kierk becomes obsessed with another project—investigating the sudden and suspicious death of a colleague. As his search for truth brings him closer to Carmen Green, another postdoc, their list of suspects grows, along with the sense that something sinister may be happening all around them.
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The Revelations, not unlike its main character, is ambitious and abrasive, challenging and disarming. Bursting with ideas, ranging from Greek mythology to the dark realities of animal testing, to some of the biggest unanswered questions facing scientists today, The Revelations is written in muscular, hypnotic prose, and its cyclically dreamlike structure pushes the boundaries of literary fiction. Erik Hoel has crafted a stunning debut of rare power—an intense look at cutting-edge science, consciousness, and human connection.
“Sly and erudite, The Revelations grabs you by the res cogitans and plunges, with pulse-pounding suspense, into a shadowy hall-of-mirrors mystery—which turns out to be nothing less than the blooming, buzzing, sultry confusion of being young and alive in New York.”
-ROY SCRANTON, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and War Porn
“The Revelations is a stunningly written, Escheresque novel, concerned with the great mysteries of our age. It left me smarter for having read it. Like discovering the theory of consciousness itself, it's a strange trip that's worth taking.”
-DANA CZAPNIK, author of The Falconer
“In this wild and lyrical debut, Erik Hoel merges the dark prescience of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with the feverish writing of David Foster Wallace, creating a neon-colored cocktail of sci-fi, murder mystery, and love story that is wholly of the twenty-first century. I’ll never think about the brain--or New York City!--the same way again.”
-KATE BOLICK, bestselling author of Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own
“Neuroscientist Hoel’s dizzying, impressive debut unloads a series of nefarious plots... Fast and furious, this mind-stretching novel makes the grade.” -Publishers Weekly
“To discover the complexities of Hoel’s writing is to look straight into the dreadful eyes of agony, to breathe in the claustrophobia of a captivated being, to smell the blood oozing from the corners of its drilled skull, to witness rodents scavenge on once living flesh, without promise of deliverance.” -Berfrois
“Hoel’s debut is one of the year’s most ambitious novels to date, a provocative and weighty exploration of nothing short of human consciousness... The novel is packed full with ideas, debates, scientific inquiry, and language that seems itself to come alive. This is a mystery novel you won’t soon forget and the announcement of a major new talent.” -Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief​
"A scientific hall of mirrors... the novel takes on an almost hallucinogenic quality, with a sense of foreboding." -Amherst Bulletin
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