With a twisted sense of humor and a heavy dose of fantasy, Katchadjian takes those things that are so common as to be ordinary--bad bosses, crazy significant others, descent into drug use--and sets them in a realm that brings to mind Kafka or Kojève.

Our narrator presents us with a constantly moving array of bizarre, philosophically tinged excitement: a slave rebellion in a strange castle on an unnamed island, an attack of flying worms made of ash which either represents Adam's sin or the Oedipal complex, a feral young woman who lives off the grid on whatever she can scrounge, and a hallucinatory root that throws the narrator into a black void, which he comes to fear he may never escape.