The self-published first novel of San Francisco State University student Antoni Fares, Mold Sustaining wants to have something philosophical to say, but at its simplest it’s a story about a guy who gets high in his apartment, makes dinner, and paints on the walls. This sounds like navel-gazing at its worst, and on some level it is, but the book somehow manages to be fascinating. Our hero (known only as “This Mister”) is a suburban youth who has reached the edge of despair and plans for this meal to be his last. Each painstaking description of the food or the layout of This Mister’s apartment serves to help create a study in desperation, although it‘s hard to tell if Fares is writing as an observer or a follower of this mentality. Some writers write so smoothly that reading their prose is like eating ice cream; with turns of phrase like “the restrictive demeanor of the jovial yellow citrus,“ reading Mold Sustaining is more like hacking through a jungle. After a while Fares‘s strange style seems almost to become its own language, aspiring to something like A Clockwork Orange. Probably due to its self-published status, the book is rough around the edges, with the more-than-occasional grammar or spelling mistake. Included at the end of the volume is “So You May Hold the Sun in Your Hands,” a “brief first installment of a trilogy.”