The Mushroom Effect

She died and he lost his memories of her.

A life that, Francesco, feels destroyed, incurable.

Rehabilitation has failed.

The encouragement of his family was not enough.

Friends put aside.

Except that, suddenly, after months of unlimited suffering, an old schoolmate proposes an ambiguous solution: to try a substance able to take him into a parallel world to meet his lost love. He must travel through an uncharted reality and bend the law of nature in order to regain lost memories. But in this new reality, Francesco meets another girl and new friends.

Who are they and why do they look so familiar?

Will he be able to understand the facets of life’s deepest secrets?

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Reviewed by Publishers Weekly

Crafted as a retelling of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, Iori’s ambitious psychological drama centers on love, death, and loss-and what it takes for the heart to heal. In Italy, reeling from the death of Lisa, the woman he loves, is jolted to discover that memory loss has wiped her face from his mind. Soon, he receives an impossible offer from his old friend Losco: the chance to see her face again, after ingesting honeyed mushrooms with psychotropic properties. But Losco’s plan calls both for facing the past and moving on from it, as he books Francesco in a seaside resort. Past and present, new friends and old, get bound up together, all as Francesco feels like ＂a meteorite ready to hit the bottom of the abyss with a thud.＂

Despite the references to myth and Dante’s Divine Comedy, Francesco’s journey takes him through the present and the recent past, and is primarily realistic in its telling, though readers will wonder, along with Francesco, what experiences he’s truly living through, and when. Rather than an underworld, Iori twines a pair of beach cities into the tale, Sanremo and Bournemouth, and presents Frencesco with the opportunity to connect with-and maybe love-someone new. Francesco seeks not to have Lisa forever, in the manner of the heroes of myth, but to reclaim her memory and to learn to live withou her, a distinction that sets this psychologically incisive telling apart from its inspirations.

Readers should expect that, as Francesco edges toward new possibilities, that things are not quite as they seem. (The protagonist did, after all, swallow six mushrooms, press a red button, and agrees to a set of rules for Losco’s regimen that preclude human contact.) But by story’s end it all makes clear emotional sense, and even is touched with wisdom, especially in the final revelations, some wrenching, from Losco.