It has been said to me by various barroom loafers – the sort of wise but disordered, self-tortured drunks that would be at home inside Eddie Caro’s Chinchorro, the harbor dive where the therianthropic characters of Brendan Shay Basham’s Swim Home to the Vanished meet to prophesize and lament — that all of which a person has inside of them has been given by their ancestors, that despite how We strive for a different or better life, We all are meant for the track laid by those of which come before us. This angers Us, for We like to imagine We’re individuals, destined for the path that We choose for ourselves. No, no. There’s no hope. We’re grounded to rooted systems, to the sins, triumphs, and tragedies of those long deceased.

By way of Basham’s protagonist, Damien – a young chef reprieving the death of his brother, Kai, of his parent’s abandonment, of the Long Walk: the forced displacement of his Navajo ancestors from their native land westward – the reader is repeatedly reminded of individualism’s futility. No matter where Damien goes, no matter how hard he works, nor how much alcohol he drinks, he remains bonded to the experiences of his ancestors. There’s no freedom from their well-blazed trail – or, in Damien’s case, from their watercourses.

From the initial chapters of this short, poetic novel, Basham presents a world that contains both the realism and absurdity of such a vision. Our protagonist, of which shockingly little is known about, begins to miraculously metamorphosize into a fish. Damien doesn’t seem particularly alarmed by this. Simply, while shaving one morning, Damien feels gills opening behind his ears. As well, a desire for water begins to consume him, as it did his brother, Kai, who became “a fish. He became water and water became him” (4). A reckless reader might believe that Damien has gone insane in his grief, that his method of “Dismemberment … the opposite of remembering” (5) has led him into schizophrenic fantasy. No. Neither is there an explanation for why. There’s almost the sense that Damien, himself, knew he was to eventually become a fish, and now his time has come. “If I could change my fate, I would’ve been happier a long time ago,” Damien says (172-173), in response to a character’s questioning on the conflict between volition and destiny.

Soon after his transformation begins, Damien abandons his job and home. With a wet towel wrapped around his gills, he ventures out to the unknown. Soon after a brief, mystical conversation with The Goatherd, an elderly sage sitting in a meadow, Damien ends up in a sea-village occupied by various human-animals: drunken, belligerent, violent, grieving. However ridiculous and muddled by surrealism this novel is, at its end, Damien returns to where Basham predicts of him from the opening pages: “When you lose someone close, you travel to a place of the dead. You enter the river, you swim in it, it takes you out to the sea” (10).

The secondary plot that accompanies the primary story of Damien overcoming the grief of his family involves Ana Maria and her three daughters: Paola, Marta, and Carla (deceased). Ana Marta, the matron with the characteristics of a lizard, is the proprietor of a small café where her daughters, and eventually, Damien, labor. These three women, who, aligned to their own family’s narrative, have undertaken the properties of lizards, work tirelessly to feed the village. Damien, a skilled chef, no matter how drunk and stoned he becomes, spends all day butchering fish for service. It’s a bold decision Basham makes, to have our protagonist work so arduously to kill, clean, and serve his own kind. This sort of cannibalism serves as a metaphor for the grieving process, how day by day, the anguished individual takes pleasure in self-destruction.

The charismatic and wise Ana Maria is a witchy succubus, fastening Damien to a poisonous mezcal that intoxicates and tortures him throughout the story as her secretive, industrious, and suspicious daughters, Paola, and Marta, attempt to rescue Damien (and themselves) from their presaged conclusions. For much of the novel, Damien joins them in this forgetting. He indulges in the drink to keep himself separate from both his past and future. The liquor “keeps them in a state of inertia, stamps out any semblance of free will” (177). This push-pull between inaction and progress causes frustration in readers the first time through the story, though clarity when reread, for Damien is not so obstinate and cornered as Ana Maria and her daughters wish him to be.

As we learn, Ana Maria is a killer, of people and of souls. Destined to a life of resentment, she narcissistically attempts to manipulate those around her while refusing to examine her own role in her family’s destruction. Her decision to bring Damien into her family’s fold, to dose him with the mezcal, to constantly keep him in a feeble, intoxicated state, is both caring and nightmarish. In the way that she has blinded herself to reality, she wishes to shield this young, lost man from the harsh reality of life. Of course, her effort is in vain. Damien rebels, with assistance from her daughters, and, as the story moves into its final section, a sense of doom overcomes the atmosphere of the town, as the elders warn of a plague-like storm that will wash its central amphibian out to sea.

Although our characters are terrified by the prospects of the tempest, their worry is so pointless that Damien stands in front of this “plastic sea” (207), awaiting its calamity. Paula and Marta’s struggle against their mother eventually leads to the raising of Carla from her burial place. The sisters attempt to reinforce the past, while Damien turns himself towards the water. That is where he belongs. They do their best to rage against Damien’s enduring wisdom, but superior forces will come to prove him right – “the earth shakes, crumbles,” (221), like biblical retribution. “This is an inside-out earth,” Basham writes (223), as the characters are swallowed by the ground, and Damien, as it was always meant to be, is swept out to sea. The sea. Where Kai was found, with fishing hooks that reminds him of his mother and father, where he will “grow fat and happy,” free from the pain of this modern world.