Belly-Crawling Through the Dark

Alyssa Quinn reviews Ben Segal’s experimental novel “Tunnels.”

By Alyssa QuinnJune 1, 2025

• Fiction

LET ME BEGIN with a disclaimer: everything I am about to tell you is false. Or, rather, it isn’t correct, a distinction that Ben Segal’s rhizomatic novel Tunnels (2024) insists upon.

Set in a fictional, tunnel-ridden region of the California desert, the novel’s form replicates the labyrinthine structure of its setting. Each verso page is blank, while each recto bears a three-by-three grid. The squares in this grid contain fragments of narrative, which can be read horizontally (along the x-axis), vertically (along the y-axis), or through the page to the corresponding square on the page behind it (along the z-axis). Some squares are blacked out. Indeed, Segal exhausts every possible configuration of contiguous black squares, beginning with zero and ending with nine, so that they proliferate as the novel progresses. Narrative fragments end, the book’s foreword informs us, when they run into the border of the grid or into a black square.

When entering this three-dimensional narrative space, the first challenge readers will confront is themselves. Segal’s foreword invites readers to “find their own paths through the text” and to treat the book “as something to be explored rather than exhaustively or systematically read.” Thus unburdened from the strictures of the conventional page, how will you proceed? What urges, whims, biases, or tricks of fate will guide your path through this tunnelscape? As I began my initial spelunking, I quickly found myself confronting my own readerly tendencies, and was not always happy with what they revealed. Was I drawn to the z-axis, for instance, because it appeared to offer the most efficient route through the 400-page tome? Reading it, as I did, in the midst of a hectic academic semester, with an email inbox full to brimming, a ponderous stack of student papers to grade, and unending committee meetings that required my attendance, was I seduced by the possibility of plunging straight through the book as quickly as possible? If so, what kind of reader had I become?

This bibliophile’s hand-wringing peaked once I reached page 23, where I encountered my first dead end: a black square in the bottom right-hand corner of the grid. I could proceed no further along any of the three axes. My misguided hope of finding a continuous path through the text thwarted, I now faced a difficult decision: what logic would determine the shape of my backtrack? How far back ought I to go? Despite Segal’s insistence in his foreword that there is “no ‘correct’ order of reading,” I felt determined to find such an order. I tried flipping back to the first page, but due to the configuration of black squares, no route that began there could lead any farther than page 23. Eventually I was forced to concede: I had to just jump in, somewhere after page one, and I would have to continue jumping in for the rest of the book, backtracking according to no systematic logic but rather a peripatetic one.

It was only after I made peace with this fact that the true magic of Tunnels revealed itself to me.

Tunnels is a book that demands incessant rereading while simultaneously precluding rereading. Read it 100 times and you will read 100 different books. Of course, this is true, to some extent, of all books. Like Heraclitus’s river, you can’t enter the same book twice. Coming back to a book the second, third, or fourth time, the reader is a different person, living in a different world, and the previous readings haunt the new one the way childhood memories haunt an adult’s visit home. But in Tunnels, this effect is accelerated and multiplied, as the need to backtrack continually returns you to squares you’ve seen before. When you come upon a previously read square, this time via a different route, its meaning is entirely transformed: it is true in a different way.

Unlike one character in the novel, who enjoys rewatching movies because of the “mastery of recollection,” the way “knowledge of what will happen slips into a sense of control,” readers of Tunnels will find that each successive rereading decreases their mastery of the text. One square can hold many meanings, all true simultaneously, despite appearing incommensurate. And the reader perceives still other truths, hovering just out of sight, contained within unread squares or unread sequences of squares. These tunnels, then, are quantum ones: many worlds coexist here, forming a wave function that refuses to collapse.

A prime example of this multiplicity can be seen in Tunnels’ kaleidoscopically shifting cast of characters. At first, these characters, each of whom wanders in and around the tunnelands, appear more or less conventional: we meet Frank, Palmer, Miles, Martha, Carson, Elizabeth, Johnson, Archer, and Clara. But then we also encounter Frank Palmer, Miles Palmer, Miles Archer, Miles Frank, Miles Carson, Elizabeth Carson, Elizabeth Johnson, Clara Johnson, and Johnson Johnson. Attempts to attach coherent characters to any of these names quickly run into problems. For example, at times “Carson” is a cop from Nevada, while at others he’s Martha’s pet zebra finch. “Martha” herself is at times a woman dreamed up by “Miles” and at others an aspiring artist who weaves images of birds using bloodstained strands of used dental floss.

These various characters often merge, displaying uncanny similarities (for instance, at least five of them have a policeman as a father), but just as often they diverge, splitting what appeared to be a single person into several separate identities. And then, flickering here and there within the twisty, shadowy tunnels, there is an “I,” a first-person narrator who freely admits he likes to “take on faces that are not [his] own” and adopts pseudonyms (including Miles Palmer and Miles Frank) with such frequency that his old name has become mere “linguistic jetsam,” a title that no longer fits:

Distraught, I kept turning my lost name over in my mouth, half-speaking it, forming it with my lips and tongue, wearing it smooth like a sucking stone. Then it sort of caught in my throat and I couldn’t speak around the shape. It sounds metaphorical, I know, but I experienced the whole thing as a distinctly physical phenomenon.

This idea—the presence of absence—recurs throughout the novel. It’s implicit in the book’s very form: Segal’s foreword admonishes readers not to try to read “every narrative thread or even every square. Imagine instead,” he suggests, “that the parts you miss are better than the ones you read; let your fantasy of the book emerge in the incompleteness of your reading. In this way you can access both the book itself and its ideal.” Just as a tunnel is constituted by what isn’t there, so is the “ideal version” of Tunnels.

Indeed, the first-person narrator begins at one point “to think of the not-said as a subtracted version of the said, as excavated space inside piling streams of language. […] Dug-out dirt is not erased but displaced as a mound. Might unsaid words mass also?” In Tunnels, they certainly do, not only via the infinite unread versions of the book that lie alongside the read versions, but also in the black squares themselves, the “dead ends.” While a three-dimensional reading experience would be defamiliarizing enough, it’s the black squares that totally unmoor one, as I discovered on page 23. They introduce a hesitation, a stutter, a spanner in the wheel of narrative progress. In the moments after encountering a black square, the reader must make a choice, must decide which kind of reader they will be—a choice that, in turn, determines what kind of a novel this is. “It is truly unsettling to find one’s self rendered useless by a thing that isn’t there,” says the first-person narrator regarding his absent name—a statement that also describes the task of the book’s reviewer. Anything I write about the Tunnels I read may well be untrue about the Tunnels you read.

Tunnels, then, is an anti-essentialist text, one that insists upon a multiplicity of truths. This multiplicity is what gives the novel its liberatory power, for Tunnels is at every turn subversive, revolutionary, and antiauthoritarian. Take, for instance, the shifting characters. Their lack of stable, coherent identities is not, ultimately, a cause for crisis but rather a source of emancipation. The first time Johnson Johnson appears, we learn that he is “easily recognizable by the tattooed mountains that cove[r] almost half his body.” Shortly thereafter, however, we learn that Johnson tattooed himself specifically to avoid easy recognition; he encouraged others to get identical tattoos so that “his whole community would blend in the eyes of witnesses.” This is indeed what occurs, and the cult of mountain-tattooed members thereby succeeds in getting beyond the grasp of the state apparatus: “If law acts by hailing particular bodies, Johnson asked, but it can’t recognize us, how can we be policed?” Here Segal suggests that by divesting oneself of the myth of stable identity, one can also cast off the shackles of the oppressed subject.

The tunnelands, it turns out, represent the perfect landscape to facilitate this liberation. It’s no coincidence that so many of the characters are children of policemen—guided by an anarchic impulse, they flee their reactionary fathers and flock to the tunnelands, an “outlaw heterotopia” and “zone beyond,” where, slipping between identities, they dream of “radical transformation.” Like Tunnels itself, the tunnelands reconfigure space and time. No longer bound by the chronotopes of the city, characters are free to take up surreal art projects (e.g., an avian painting produced by feeding birds breadcrumbs laced with nontoxic dye, so their feces stain the terrain below), to formulate new religions of “chthonic mysticism,” to investigate supernatural occurrences (such as a series of “mouths” that appear in the earth, leading to fleshy subterranean throats from which “reincarnated opera greats” seem to sing), or to engage in ritualistic acts of digging (two sects of “penitent mouth diggers,” the “spitters” and the “chewers,” work to expand the tunnel network, moved as they are “by the transformation of earth into emptiness […] which bears a resemblance, or a relation, to transubstantiation”). With space, time, and social relations thus radically transformed, new possibilities abound.

This is not to say that the tunnelands are a utopia; on the contrary, they are rife with conflict, death, grief, and the creeping tendrils of bureaucracy and institutional force. One character mourning for his deceased sister finds himself under the scrutiny of the Mourning Surveillance Unit, a squad charged with monitoring appropriate levels of grief, and intervening if those levels are exceeded. Here we see the beginnings of what Segal calls “the corrosive force of force” leaching into the tunnelands. Elsewhere, capitalist structures sprout like stalagmites, manifesting as a marketplace in the “damp agora of a massive public cavern,” where vendors “peddle fried goods from carts.” Furthermore, we learn that the land itself is “toxic” and that the tunnels once served as Indigenous burial grounds, reminding us that this desert has been colonized. Everywhere in the tunnelands, the metastases of civilization are visible. After all, a heterotopia—a different place—defines itself by what it opposes, what it is different from. And (to get a little Derridean) to say that the tunnelands are not society unavoidably brings society into the tunnelands.

It does not follow, however, that the tunnelands’ difference is neutralized. That difference may only exist relative to society, but it exists nonetheless. As Segal writes of one character: “He wants not to escape the world but to live in a different world entirely.” Escape may not be possible, but alterity is—in the tunnels, and in Tunnels.

Reading Tunnels forced me to reckon with the authoritarian portions of my own mind, the part of me that cleaves unwittingly to system and order, origin and telos. It was a vital reminder that those tendencies exist in me, and that the project of their dismantling is and must be unending. It was also one of the most deeply pleasurable reading experiences I have had in recent years, a speleological triumph that suggests that, at its best, the avant-garde is not a unit of soldiers tasked with reconnaissance but rather a band of wanderers belly-crawling through the dark, inviting us to join them in getting lost.