STEVE GERGLEY’S STONE CELLS OPENS on last day of summer before eighth grade, when thirteen-year-olds Margot Stanley and Johnnie Quinn find a mansion hidden in the woods behind their housing development. It’s a Bluebeard house at its core, run by a robed reptilian that has apparently been collecting curious children inside its walls for thousands of years. Margot is the kind of kid who’s long decided that the scientific method can out-argue anything, including a talking lizard. She is intelligent, anxious, empirical, and literal-minded. It’s no wonder her working mythology is built around Einstein, Hawking, and Curie. She doesn’t believe in magic, even when magic is biting her on the leg. She believes there must be an explanation for everything, and that if she gathers enough observations and remembers enough facts from her science books, the answer will appear before her. The great joke of the novel is that she is often right. There is an explanation for everything all right, but the explanation she seeks usually makes things worse.

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Despite the novel’s lurid, almost pulpy premise, Gergley’s prose approaches the subject matter with a near-scientific curiosity. He does not rush his characters from set piece to set piece, but instead, he gives them room to explore and examine, like mice that are conscious they are stuck in a maze. In this circuitous, treacherous environment, his characters turn into involuntary subjects, cycling between hungry, thirsty, exhausted, injured, suspicious, bored, horny, resentful, and eventually dependent on one another. In the process, the mansion’s impossible geography gradually becomes an integral part of their adventures: an infinite hallway flooded ankle-deep with water and fitted with child-height doorknobs; an orchard of pear trees growing where a library should be; an elevator paneled with rows of crystal buttons in garnet, obsidian, amethyst, sapphire, and colors Margot can’t name. Gergley paints a miniature and texturally rich American childhood out of secret hallways and railroad tracks and Jawbreakers and Super Nintendo before they all get swallowed whole by the mansion’s cruel, insatiable appetite.

^{Stone Cells, 2026
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Then, the novel performs its strangest turn. Margot awakens after seventeen years sealed inside a cocoon of gold, physically twenty-nine but carrying an interrupted thirteen-year-old consciousness. Johnnie is there too, now an adult who has survived alone within the mansion’s artificial world. Their childhood dynamic returns. He is still the same old irritating kid, and she is still determined to prove she understands things better than he does. Their relationship still serves as the book’s real labyrinth, zigzagging between affection, rivalry, sexual curiosity, distrust, dependence, manipulation, tenderness, and betrayal. One thing they have in common is the desire to be free, only in entirely different ways. Compared to Margot’s quest for a way out, Johnnie’s desire remains almost embarrassingly simple: no school, no homework, no chores, no dentist, no job, no life arranged by other people. The mansion, in his limited understanding of the world, appears to have granted his wish. It gives him food, shelter, endless space, and no obligations other than being a permanent resident. Unlike Margot, he refuses to see that freedom supplied by his captor is not really freedom. He has escaped the ordinary world only to become an animal in someone else’s study, submitting reports and fulfilling contractual requirements while insisting, at least partly, that he has chosen this life.

Here, the title does its trick twice over. The mansion is made of stone and filled with chambers all right, but the “cells” in question are also inevitably biological. Bodies heal, regenerate, mutate, and produce a mysterious gold substance that replaces blood in a fittingly cartoonish aesthetic. In the meantime, Gergley braids the novel’s central metaphors with a sharp emotional register, switching between the architectural cell and the living cell, between imprisonment and regeneration. He remains peculiarly committed to painting the material world in exhaustive detail, almost as a natural extension of Margot’s mind. He wants us to know what kind of wood the staircase is made from, what geometric form a crystal resembles, where the light falls precisely, how a body should effectively distribute its weight while crawling through a doorway, and all for a reason. This density and textbook-like exactitude could have easily made another novel inert, airless at its core, but in Stone Cells, it becomes the main narrative propeller, an essential part of understanding Margot’s consciousness. Like the inside of her head, the novel exudes extravagance, drawing from the particularities of the maximalist novels.

Stone Cells is huge, peculiar, funny, explicit, claustrophobic, earnest, and deliciously quirky. It contains everything from an alien scientist and giant almonds to cellular immortality to Gothic pornography. It is essentially a novel about that delicate bridge between a life unfulfilled and what comes after, about walking through the wrong door and discovering that there may no longer be a correct one to walk back through. That’s one of the reasons why the grand hall near the end, papered floor to ceiling in paintings and carvings left behind by fourteen thousand years of previous captives, resonates differently to the reader. If anything, it’s exactly the kind of strange and lingering image for a novel that deals with a life stolen from you. Gergley has written a coming-of-age story in which the age or time don’t really occupy a space, or never really quite catches up with the body that carries their weight. And it’s fair to say he understands, better than most, that the most frightening room in any house is the one you built for yourself, for your own good and amusement, without ever noticing it’s probably just another trap of your making. •

Stone Cells is available for purchase through Translucent Eye Press.



Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. His most recent book, There Are Some Floors Missing, was published by Bullshit Lit on February 20th, 2026. He’s also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.

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