Sphyxia is the story of Trey Burnes, 17, as told by him through a “writing cure” that seeks to understand everything that has happened to him right up to moment he is writing. Trey’s is a quiet, patient labor, a discipline of notebooks and pens, and it compels him to rebuild his memory from childhood onward. The therapeutic purpose — of writing, of remembering — is to bring order and clarity to seventeen years that have crashed into a final trauma that has been coalescing, day by day, incident by incident, since Trey first understood that his family lived in a funeral home, that his mother and father were morticians, and that the basement under his feet, yet often uppermost in his imagination, was a hidden, forbidden place where corpses lay on stainless-steel tables.
To say that Trey has been haunted by all this is to say the least about this novel, which for realistic, palpable horror easily bests the scariest genre piece I have ever read. Paul Cody is well-acquainted with the quiet spaces of the night and wise about the secrets of the human heart — to say nothing of the terrifying, destructive deeps of the human mind. Sphyxia is a mindful, measured rendition of how one maltreated, frightened child almost loses his life, then regains it by telling the story of the worst thing that has ever happened to him. Rest assured (no pun intended), it is worse than anything you or I have endured.
It takes integrity and courage to look at life steadily and to see it whole. How much greater the honesty, how much stronger the will, to walk right up to death and look into its blank, lightless eyes? To lie down next to it as if in preparation for one’s final end? Which is always coming too soon. By articulating our pain and our fear, we can hold them in check. Trey can never forget what has happened to him or change the history of his first seventeen years, but he can master the trauma and fight it to a draw. At that point, he can escape the shadow of death and walk into the sunshine: his life from that point onward. And yet, a final confrontation awaits at the threshold most difficult to cross.