(Heidi Julavits reads tonight at University Book Store. The reading is free.)

Early in Heidi Julavits's new novel The Vanishers, a group of psychics get together to play a game of catch. The way it works is this: The headmaster of a school for physics mentally "throws" an image to a crowd of students and faculty, who then try to correctly guess what that image is. The first few images are thoughts of furniture and cast-off items that sit around the house. But sometimes, the pitcher "torques" a throw, kind of sends a mental curveball that gets inside of the catchers' heads and plays havoc. Only our narrator sees what's really going on:

I did not intend to "catch" what Madame Ackermann threw, but to avoid doing so was like trying not to watch a car burn. What tumulted through the air was a wheel of horror (dismembered limbs, splatters of gray matter) that repeated its sequence as it rolled toward me. I clutched the bannister. Dizzy did not begin to describe how I felt.

Ackermann implants into the narrator a psychic sickness that plagues her for years. Her symptoms, basically, are everything that can go wrong with a body without killing it: Headaches, bodily pains, boils, limps, frailties, coughs, fears, and discolorations. It's a great way to discuss the kind of mental anguish we sometimes suffer at the hands of our friends and coworkers. In all of her novels, Julavits writes some of the best broken people in modern fiction. Their interior lives are dark and wounded, they dwell on heartaches and what might have been. And the narrator of The Vanishers is maybe her best protagonist yet: She's reliably unreliable, a potential monster who's quick to label other people as monstrous. There are real monsters in The Vanishers, too: Ackermann and the narrator are plagued by a psychic wolf called the Fenrir that forms from thin air:

Its skeleton rulered the air with wet, gray notches; it thickened with muscle and then bound itself in an opalescent casing from which sprouted a steely fur. Two eyeballs emerged above a snout that cracked apart to display a prehistoric maw of teeth, row upon row of enamel sawblades to which it appeared the pinking shears of a vicious evolution had been applied.

This is a horror story, told in Julavits's gorgeous, surprising language. It's obsessed with the physical, the ligature, the nervous twitch, as much as it is with the brain and all of its knots and mists. Real injury can come to the realm of the body when two brains interact in a dangerous way. That's a dark magic of its own.