Steele’s surreal historical novel chronicles weird happening in a settlement in 16th-century America.

Penelope Turner and Alaster Harper are young people who have sailed from England to the New World (in the novel’s conceit, the bulk of the text comes from their respective journals). Alaster’s father is a secular humanist and Penelope’s father is a preacher. They are part of a group of settlers that has taken a nuanced approach to creating a colony; while the community is prone to the usual squabbles, the members get along remarkably well, even as some prove to be religious while others are logic-loving skeptics. One day, a strange woman and boy appear who are unlike anyone they have encountered. They are greenish in color; the boy dies, and the woman lives. The woman belongs to no native group, yet she has no knowledge of Europe; she eventually attains a normal skin color, but her origins remain mysterious. She is called Agnes. The arrival of Agnes is merely the beginning of the utterly bizarre events to come, which include the appearance of mysterious metal sculptures and a cathedral. The entries from Penelope and Alaster’s journals are written in a manner meant to evoke a bygone mode of expression; Alaster writes that one of the sculptures seems to represent “a great nautilus, with diaphanous waters fanned and smoothly spilling from the greatest aspect of its spiral, then caught by the limpid pool at its base.” This stylized prose makes the long novel (it’s over 800 pages) feel even longer. Still, such passages can be intriguing—when strange things start to happen, they build a palpable sense of mystery. (Who actually is Agnes? How do strange things keep appearing?) With the addition of some engaging interpersonal strife, like Penelope’s longing for Alaster, there is always reason to keep turning the pages.  

Though the prose is dense, this invitingly odd narrative keeps building intrigue.

In Steele’s novel, a parole officer stumbles on a web of corruption at work.

Cleveland “Cleve” Ishmael works for the Department of Corrections in Kumhokot County, Pennsylvania; more specifically, he works for the Home Detention Unit, which oversees inmates who’ve been permitted to serve out their sentences in the confines of their own residences. Readers quickly understand that he’s witnessed some sort of grave corruption in his own ranks, and that he felt compelled to discuss it with an authority. However, the details are revealed at a numbingly slow pace over more than 600 pages. Eventually, Cleve notes that he happened upon some irregularities in the casefiles of a fellow parole officer, who mysteriously vanished. As Cleve investigated further, he uncovered a dark tangle of impropriety and crime, which included unspeakable injustices. The book is framed as a transcript of Cleve’s responses to questions asked by a mental health clinician, who’s evaluating his fitness for work, given the clear signs of PTSD he’s exhibiting.The interview is wide-ranging, as the protagonist discusses his family lineage, his childhood, and the death of his parents, all in a style so unhurried that he repeatedly notes the fact that it drifts off-topic. In an afterword, Steele declares his intention to “satirize…hateful, cruel rhetoric and attitudes to the point of ironic caricature.” However, the book delivers no real satire; instead, readers experience the childish crudeness of Cleve, who repeatedly refers to the clinician with epithets such as “dumb fuck” and “numb-nuts,” and to people in his profession as “cock-swallowing thunder-cunts.” Indeed, he seems to delight in using offensive terminology: “I use the term retard a lot, and it upsets you, because maybe you know a retard, and he’s a good guy, or maybe she’s your daughter and you love her, or maybe you’re in love with one.” None of this is particularly dark or funny, which challenges Steele’s announcement that it’s a work of “dark, comedic fiction.” The novel’s singular virtue is its description of the “Democratic-political machine” in Pennsylvania, and its well-documented, labyrinthine corruption.

An overlong novel that’s weighed down by unnecessary digressions.

In Steele’s mystery novel, an English professor and a police officer struggle to solve a murder after the killer sends a cryptic letter.

Jeffrey Wilson, a literature professor at Seldon University, receives a verbose letter in which an anonymous man confesses to killing a girl. The man threatens to kill again unless the professor uses the included cypher to identify the letter writer. The killer uses a number of allusions and oblique language to give clues about his identity; the victim is a student at the college who was previously in Jeffrey’s class. The letter includes a jumble of literary references, and Jeffrey and his colleague Moss pick it apart to try to make sense of the cypher. Detective Sarah Kelley is also trying to solve the murder, and she believes Jeffrey is hiding something. (The killer writes rambling letters to Sarah, too.) Meanwhile, Jeffrey’s demanding father thinks his son should retain a lawyer in case the letter implicates him in the crime. Readers get a few scenes from the killer’s point of view, filling in the backstory of his childhood and the trauma he’s experienced (“He peered up frantically, searching the heavens for a great change, for an escape, for an absent God, and for a different answer to his prayer”); it emerges that the murderer may be killing because of something that happened to his sister, and something about the case triggers Sarah’s memory of a previous crime. The narrative is weighed down by a lot of wordy, purple prose; the text is dense and at times impenetrable. Much of the novel is spent on the contemplative explication of various texts and literary allusion—there are several scenes that are just Jeffrey and Moss trading quips about the references in the original letter. There is some sense of urgency in the fact that Jeffrey must solve the cypher in order to prevent another murder, but the pacing of the novel doesn’t support this; too often, the narrative stops to describe and explain rather than move the story forward. Even so, Steele delivers a brutal twist of an ending.

A meandering mystery.