The Fourth Wall by Scott Petty
Possessing extrasensory powers, Captain Thomas Jett was living comfortably in Houston, building up his law practice and serving in the Army Reserve when he got the call to volunteer in Afghanistan. “With all my experience in law, military intelligence, archeology, and the knowledge of the occult, I was the one.”
Classified as a military intelligence analyst, Jett is eager for a place where the patterns of the universe will be explained. “I saw war as a path, a puzzle, an experience … I saw it as a vehicle for metaphysical growth … Afghanistan was only the start of my epic adventure.”
The Fourth Wall (Atmosphere Press) by Scott Petty, an Army veteran of Afghanistan, is a paranormal war story. Captain Jett experiences all the horrors of conflict — bombs that separate torsos from limbs, comrades dying around him, dogs eating dead bodies, the stench. He can also sense the fates of his fellow warriors.
“I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was marked for death, in my eyes,” he says. “It was his aura.” When his commanding officer tells him, “Kill before being killed. A sense of insanity can help keep you alive,” Jett pegs the man as a lunatic.
But, as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 so famously explained, only the crazy go to war.
REALITY THROUGH EXTRASENSORY PRECEPTION
“I went to Afghanistan to invent something, to discover universal truths, but I kept finding darkness within darkness,” reports Jett. “It was a first taste of the transcendent experience I had been seeking … to better understand what is beyond four dimensions, three of space and one of time, to transcend the fourth wall … a place I was not yet able to access.”
He calls his system for interpreting reality “The Fourth Wall,” an unconventional way of integrating the events of the war with a dreamlike conflict.
Assigned to investigate a mass murder in a place called Mars Station in the country beyond Kandahar, Jett hears the village elders report “seeing wraithlike shapes and hearing things that weren’t human.” Jett’s translator says the murders were the work of a jinni, a creature of smoke and fire. Jett suspects it’s a curse from beyond the fourth wall. Instead of the Taliban, he sees raw evil.
Jett’s first person narration is dreamlike. He develops a theory of parallel worlds, with wars in both. Descriptions of day-to-day military operations (the charts, the memos, intel reports) belong on one side; his feelings and extrasensory perceptions on the other.
Jett studies a missing soldier’s notebooks that are filled with a science fiction story on other worlds, or plans for a video game, but he suspects a deeper meaning. He tells his commanding general, “There is a side of this war beyond what you see with your own eyes, almost beyond belief … We’re dealing with monsters. I’ve had experience with this kind of thing.”
AN IMAGINATIVE MAP THROUGH THE FOG OF WAR
The book’s glossary of abbreviations, from AAR (after action report) to VBIED (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device) only serves to separate military speak from what Jett senses.
Jett carries with him a Tarot card given to him by a witch back home. “More and more each day, I resembled the man on the card,” he says of the Magician. It’s the first card of the Tarot deck, and signifies new beginnings and opportunities, with unlimited potential.
In Afghanistan, he meets another witch, a Russian woman barber who cuts his hair. He’s attracted to her; she’s hiding secrets, too. “The barbers were either Russian or Cambodian. We were together in this mess, old Cold War buddies in a disturbing little scheme.”
Kirkus Reviews calls The Fourth Wall “a bizarre but entertainingly trippy tale of soldiers and paranormal creatures.” Fans of war novels and fans of more imaginative tales alike will be drawn into Jett’s map through the fog of war, but will come to different conclusions, one more phantasmagoric and Lovecraftian than the other.
The Fourth Wall is available for purchase here.
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