Up Above the World was published by Simon & Schuster in 1966. It is Bowles’s shortest and most genre-adjacent novel — essentially a thriller, though one so psychologically strange and so indifferent to conventional suspense mechanics that it barely functions as genre fiction. An elderly American couple, Dr. and Mrs. Slade, are on vacation in an unnamed Central American country when they encounter Grover Soto, a charming young expatriate who invites them to his remote estate.
Soto has murdered his mother. The Slades, innocently, witnessed something that might connect him to the crime. Rather than kill them (which would create additional problems), Soto drugs them — using a combination of hallucinogens and sedatives administered over days — to erase their memories of the relevant period. The novel tracks this process: the Slades’ gradual loss of temporal orientation, their confusion about where they are and how they arrived, their inability to distinguish between dream and waking, drug experience and reality.
Bowles’s interest is not in suspense (the reader knows what is happening long before the victims do) but in the phenomenology of consciousness under assault: what it feels like to lose one’s grip on time, identity, and causality. The Central American landscape — lush, tropical, overwhelming in its sensory density — becomes an accomplice to the disorientation: a place where the boundary between interior and exterior, self and world, has always been thinner than Americans assume.
The novel is the most explicit statement of Bowles’s lifelong preoccupation: that Western selfhood is a pharmacological state — maintained by specific neurochemical balances that can be disrupted by drugs, disease, or the wrong landscape — rather than a metaphysical given.
Collecting Up Above the World
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1966): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first edition: $100–$250
- Without jacket: $10–$20
The least famous of Bowles’s novels but increasingly appreciated by scholars interested in psychedelic literature and the phenomenology of consciousness.