The Sorcery of White Rats: A Novel

Having read decades of fantasy and science fiction from Tolkien and Le Guin to newer voices like Jemisin, I find myself less dazzled by spectacle and more intrigued by how stories use the fantastic to probe human truths. Adam Bertocci’s The Sorcery of White Rats struck me as just that sort of novel: not merely a tale of visions and world-ending prophecy, but a layered exploration of how fragile lives intersect with forces too large to name.

The story follows Bristol Volavaunt and her roommate Monroe Fisher, two women in their twenties who find their unremarkable lives shaken when Monroe experiences a vision of apocalypse so vivid it rattles her sense of reality. What stood out most to me was not the chaos of the vision itself, but the aftermath: Monroe muttering over and over, “We have to get out of the city.” That single refrain captures the dread of knowing something is deeply wrong, while the rest of the world carries on as usual.

As someone who has lived through decades of upheaval, I appreciated how the book portrays that uneasy gap between private terror and public indifference. When Monroe collapses, speaking in tongues and declaring herself “Empress,” bound to bring about destruction, I couldn’t help but think of countless historical moments when people dismissed prophets, only to later realize they might have glimpsed a truth too terrible to confront.

The speculative heart of the novel is most evident in its treatment of dreams and consciousness. I enjoyed the sections with Xochitl, the neuroscientist, who frames Monroe’s visions not as supernatural but as part of the slippery overlap between dreaming, psychosis, and prophecy. That interplay reminded me of classic science fiction’s fascination with perception and reality; Philip K. Dick in particular comes to mind. When Xochitl muses that REM sleep might itself be a form of psychosis, the book dares us to wonder if all of human consciousness is a fragile, negotiated hallucination.

I also admired the symbolic touches. Bristol’s fixation on discarded objects like the picture frame she salvages from the trash early on represents her desire to give shape and meaning to her own life. The white rats she greets at the pet shop downstairs echo the novel’s title and serve as a living metaphor for humanity: small, overlooked, scrambling in cages of our own making, yet still subject to cosmic currents beyond comprehension.

If I have a quibble, it’s that the narrative’s structure, shifting between testimony, personal accounts, and more traditional narrative, occasionally diluted the emotional impact. At times, I longed for more immersion in the characters’ inner lives rather than being pulled into their fragmented retellings. The novel demands patience, and younger readers might find its rhythms disorienting.

Still, as a lover of speculative fiction, I found The Sorcery of White Rats to be a rewarding read. It marries the intimacy of a friendship with the enormity of cosmic forces, offering both the claustrophobia of a shabby apartment and the terrifying vastness of a universe on the brink. It’s not escapism in the traditional sense; it’s too raw and unnerving for that, but it is a reminder of why I read science fiction and fantasy in the first place: to see our human struggles refracted through the prism of the unknown.