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As If Fire Could Hide Us
A love song in three movements
As If Fire Could Hide Us explores the expansiveness of consciousness and compassion through and beyond the human body.
A twelve-year-old girl slips out a basement window, steals a bike, and sets off on a perilous adventure. Injured and slowly bleeding out, Orelia enters a vast, spectacularly animate environment where she senses the limits of self disintegrating, her being entangled with the forest.
A prison guard and member of the strap down team witnesses a painfully prolonged execution and is delivered to a heart-cracking sense of identification with the ones he’s killed. Every grieving mother is his own. Any man might be himself, his closest friend, his brother.
An organ donor’s body is restored and resurrected through the bodies of multitudes. Spiritually and physically, one human being becomes many. Everything in the cosmos is intertwined and interchangeable. Embracing this awareness may bring fear or euphoria—desolation, peace, despair, rapture.
As If Fire Could Hide Us explores the expansiveness of consciousness and compassion through and beyond the human body.
A twelve-year-old girl slips out a basement window, steals a bike, and sets off on a perilous adventure. Injured and slowly bleeding out, Orelia enters a vast, spectacularly animate environment where she senses the limits of self disintegrating, her being entangled with the forest.
A prison guard and member of the strap down team witnesses a painfully prolonged execution and is delivered to a heart-cracking sense of identification with the ones he’s killed. Every grieving mother is his own. Any man might be himself, his closest friend, his brother.
An organ donor’s body is restored and resurrected through the bodies of multitudes. Spiritually and physically, one human being becomes many. Everything in the cosmos is intertwined and interchangeable. Embracing this awareness may bring fear or euphoria—desolation, peace, despair, rapture.
206 pages, Paperback
Published April 18, 2023
46 people want to read
About the author
Melanie Rae Thon
24 books30 followersMelanie Rae Thon is a Professor of English at the University of Utah.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 19, 2023
At once a love song and lamentation to the contemporary human condition, energized with what I think of as a pantheistic physics that enables its authorial consciousness to drift in and out of myriad characters’ hearts and temporal moments, cherishing each, no matter how fraught they are, Melanie Rae Thon’s staggering new novel, As If Fire Could Hide Us, argues both through its form and content that we all exist in mesh now, enmeshed in hurt, hope, grief, astonishment, and complex acceptance; that we always can and always should search for ways to tell ourselves and our worlds bracingly anew.
January 18, 2026
Brilliant, beautiful, haunting.
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CWs:
For “Orelia, in hiding”
pregnancy, death of a child (stillbirth, drowning death), self-harm (hair pulling), shipwreck, near-death of a partner (drowning), suicidal ideation, animal experimentation & testing, death of a parent, missing child, chemotherapy, language similar to disordered & restricted eating, hysterectomy, mention of unsheltered folks, death, osteomyelitis, sepsis, mentions of dead animals & cruelty & abandonment, mention of animal agriculture & deaths (cows), mention of amputations/lost limbs, near-death of child (car accident), medical content, cancer, divorce, parole, incarceration, armed robbery, physical abuse, sanist language, bullying, mention of murdered children & those abandoned, violence, hospice, drug use, alcohol use, shooting, attempted murder, suicide, injury/injury detail, coma, ableism
For “The 7th Man”
death penalty/state sanctioned murder, murder (family annihilation), fire death, strip search, mention of drug use & addiction, IV sticks, sanist language, suicidal ideation, violence, stabbing, death of a spouse/partner, aneurysm death, blood, fire, killing of a wounded cow, coercive confession, talk of sentencing innocent & disabled folks to death, armed robbery, car jacking & (accidental) kidnapping, hit & run, murder of a police dog, urine, excrement, car crash, cancer, death of parents, injury/injury descriptions
For “The Bodies of Birds”
slaughter-house work (detailed descriptions), classism, migrant workers, immigration, mention of stabbing, mention of near-death of baby, car crash death, organ donation, burn injury, drug use, alcohol use, DUI, medical content, self-harm, surgery
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CWs:
For “Orelia, in hiding”
pregnancy, death of a child (stillbirth, drowning death), self-harm (hair pulling), shipwreck, near-death of a partner (drowning), suicidal ideation, animal experimentation & testing, death of a parent, missing child, chemotherapy, language similar to disordered & restricted eating, hysterectomy, mention of unsheltered folks, death, osteomyelitis, sepsis, mentions of dead animals & cruelty & abandonment, mention of animal agriculture & deaths (cows), mention of amputations/lost limbs, near-death of child (car accident), medical content, cancer, divorce, parole, incarceration, armed robbery, physical abuse, sanist language, bullying, mention of murdered children & those abandoned, violence, hospice, drug use, alcohol use, shooting, attempted murder, suicide, injury/injury detail, coma, ableism
For “The 7th Man”
death penalty/state sanctioned murder, murder (family annihilation), fire death, strip search, mention of drug use & addiction, IV sticks, sanist language, suicidal ideation, violence, stabbing, death of a spouse/partner, aneurysm death, blood, fire, killing of a wounded cow, coercive confession, talk of sentencing innocent & disabled folks to death, armed robbery, car jacking & (accidental) kidnapping, hit & run, murder of a police dog, urine, excrement, car crash, cancer, death of parents, injury/injury descriptions
For “The Bodies of Birds”
slaughter-house work (detailed descriptions), classism, migrant workers, immigration, mention of stabbing, mention of near-death of baby, car crash death, organ donation, burn injury, drug use, alcohol use, DUI, medical content, self-harm, surgery
July 31, 2023
A truly gorgeous book!
August 6, 2023
A lyric, ecstatic masterpiece. Plays at the boundaries of life/death, individual/ecosystem, being/non being, and poetic/literary. Makes me want to read all her work.
July 18, 2023
My full review is up on Barrelhouse: https://www.barrelhousemag.com/blog/b...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews