Breakaway Books

Authored by Omar Hussain; Published May 2025; Thriller

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

A Thousand Natural Shocks is a wild ride, and I’m not sure that that is a good thing. It feels so chaotic to read, with a bizarre mix of down-to-earth trauma and otherworldly cult figures. 

A Thousand Natural Shocks follows Dash on his quest to forget the worst moments of his life. So dedicated is he to erasing the memory of his father’s death that he first drowns himself in a deluge of prescription meds designed to make his brain malfunction, and then joins a cult that promises to set its members free from their personal histories. Somehow he still manages to fit in a job at a small local newspaper, where he fabricates a story on a serial killer, accidentally arousing his ire. As these events converge and Dash’s memory slowly erodes, he starts to form human connections and question if forgetting is really what he wants. 

This novel is a lot. There’s the sheer amount of damage that Dash is intent upon inflicting on his own body, which somehow feels more violent than anything else that happens to him. There’s the memory erasure cult, the Subterraneans, simultaneously goofy and intimidating. And then, there’s the serial killer, employing as many creepy tactics as possible to scare Dash. I felt like I was being jerked around from one threat to another with every page, and although I sympathize for Dash, it was hard not to think that he had brought all of this upon himself. But as the pages passed, I did begin to wonder about the question at the core of this book: Is there any memory so horrific that it would be worth erasing my very self in order to get rid of it? The amount of people attracted to the Subterraneans seems to indicate the author at least believes that many people have a memory that is exactly that awful.

My attention was split in too many directions reading this book. I tried to remember the multiple lives that Dash is trying to lead, and the backstory of the Japanese woman helping him to recover from addiction, and the vicious reaction of the former victim of the serial killer to Dash’s article, and… and… and… but it didn’t feel coherent. It made me feel unsettled and jumpy–and perhaps that’s the point, but I also didn’t feel satisfied at the end. There was some resolution and a convergence of a few of the storylines, but not enough that I wanted to read back through the book to see how it all fit together. (Side note: I know that people love their dogs, but a dog being the creature that ultimately pushes Dash into risking his life and confronting a serial killer? I wasn’t crazy about it.)

A cult bent on memory erasure, a grotesque serial killer, and a man so traumatized that he finds every prescription drug that might let him forget. A Thousand Natural Shocks was a little too wild for me, but maybe that isn’t the case for you.