In This Experimental Grief Novel, You Choose Your Own Adventure

BRAT, by Gabriel Smith

In the wake of his father’s death and his mother’s move to a nursing facility, a 20-something British novelist named Gabriel (not to be confused with the 20-something British novelist Gabriel Smith, whose debut, “Brat,” he inhabits) returns home. Ostensibly, he’s there to prepare his parents’ estate for sale, but he’s also hiding out from a multitude of problems. For starters, despite receiving a sizable advance for his second book, Gabriel hasn’t written a word yet.

Then, during his inebriated explorations of the house, he discovers that its structure is collapsing in some places, molding in others. His girlfriend leaves him. He meets a pair of odd teenagers at a nearby shop, and invites them over for an evening of underage drinking, plus marijuana and Xanax. Mild shenanigans ensue. Meanwhile, there may be someone watching Gabriel; if there is, that person is wearing a deer costume.

If all that wasn’t enough, Gabriel’s skin has also begun coming off, flapping free in vividly rendered body-horror scenes. (This unexplained molting is, according to a running joke, definitely not eczema.) Soon Gabriel begins to nonchalantly pick at the edges of himself: “I just kept pulling, until it had come away from all my fingers and shifting hand veins. The skin came away in a single piece. It didn’t hurt. I looked at it. It looked like a glove of myself.”

Much of the actual text of “Brat” consists of stories-within-the-story, some presented in part, others in full. In his mother’s study, Gabriel finds a novel where a woman with her same name dies in a car accident; in his father’s, there’s a script about friends who gather weekly to watch an old recorded sitcom episode, documenting the changes that appear with each new viewing. Then there are the two stories by Gabriel’s ex-girlfriend, Kei, one of which follows a Russian oligarch whose kink is masturbating on the faces of famous paintings. The other story is about love.