Fool's Run by Patricia McKillip

This book does have a plot, but I think it's more effective to just lay the pieces out: Terra killed over a thousand people seven years ago, and now she's locked in her strange, inexpressible visions on a prison colony; a musician who reads minds sometimes; a cop looking for someone who can explain the unspeakably horrible; a curious scientist with a machine that can project thoughts, who takes it upon himself to wonder if Terra might be sane after all.

So I keep reading McKillip, because -- well, I don't actually know why, except that every second or third book is strange in an engrossing way, not just in an opaque way. This is that book, only more so. It's kind of about what sanity is, kind of about language, kind of about symbology more broadly, kind of about forgiveness. It's an intense, mysterious little mechanism that got into my head and did unmeasurable, odd things in there.

I don't generally like opaque books, and this one isn't quite that . . . exactly. It's doing a whole lot of things; a few too many, actually, and I don't just say that because I didn't get it all. But McKillip managed such richness in writing and image, spun out on a thread of unspooling momentum, that I enjoyed the hell out of watching this book do it's thing, even though I don't entirely know what that was.

I suspect, though I can be convinced otherwise, that this book will be the best of McKillip for me, and everything else will be disappointingly impenetrable. But it was totally worth picking through her catalog to find it.