The near decade of violence caused by the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) has been the subject of numerous works of literature, film, scholarly studies, and journalistic reports. While many of these works have engaged with the politics of the war and its aftermath or the representation of the war and its consequences from a variety of angles, the sensory experience of the war remains an unexplored area of inquiry. This, even though war, and in particular this war and the way it was waged, was perhaps the most sensorially overwhelming experience in the lives of many it affected. The gamut of literary texts, from oral histories and memoirs to fiction, poetry, and film, make that point clear. The eight-year war with Iraq was formative for some, catastrophic for many, and has seared sensorially intense experiences into the minds and bodies of countless soldiers and citizens whom it affected.

This chapter engages with the way the senses, and particularly sound, are used in the well-known, 2006 experimental novel, The Scorpion on the Steps of the Andimeshk Railway Station, or, There's Blood Dripping from this Train, Sir! (‘Aqrab ru-ye Pelleh-ha-ye Rah-ahan-e Andimeshk, ya, az in Qatar Khun Michekeh, Qorban!) by Hossein Mortezaeian Abkenar. I contend that this binominal novel employs the senses to present a view of the war as an overall act of senselessness. I focus on the diversity of sounds related to war and their function as triggers for narrative time changes and flashbacks, acting as a thread tying together the novel's non-chronological and purposely disorganized chapters. In doing so, I draw from Constance Classen and David Howes’ now foundational work within sensory studies, as well as Martin Daughtry's more recent concept of the ‘belliphonic’. This attention to the senses allows readers to focus less exclusively on the optics of war, as literary narratives of the Iran-Iraq War tend to do, and instead grasp the war as a multisensory experience that goes beyond the visual to include distinct aural, olfactory, corporeal, and gustatory experiences.