And once a reader can get past the foul imagery there is a lot to love here. There is an intense metamorphosis and and emphasis on the changeable nature of mankind and all life. Animals shift into other animals, humans are composed of animals. There is little concern for the constant or immovable. All of this is overseen by a mad delusional God, often drunk in a cannibal revelry where we see him surveying his weird creation. Lautremont constantly seeks this God’s humiliation and abasement. But how like Lautremont He is as a curator of horrors. Is the polemic antitheist nature of this book self loathing, literary critique of Realist contemporaries, or perhaps something else? Something deeper that involves author as character and narrator and God himself.

Gothic literature often has an obsession with death and the inanimate. This is a strange perversion of that schema. It’s an obsession with putrid, wriggling, violent life. All must be personified and it must be defined by a movement that mimics the human but seeks to represent some underlying truth beneath these behaviors as we know them. Mandatory supplemental material is Dali’s own wriggling illustrations of the book.