The third book of Tarnawsky's Placebo Effect Trilogy, the five mininovels that close out a cycle of fifteen. The form was his own: compressed prose that reaches the scale of a novel through what he called "negative text," gaps of vital information the reader supplies from personal experience, finishing the book as the author's co-author.
The closing five turn the trilogy's dread outward into stranger lives. A neurotic intellectual is adopted by a couple with a son with Down syndrome, hoping to escape the stress of being normal. A man searching for meaning goes mad in the end. The son of a suicidal Prussian Junker family becomes obsessed with an albino boy. Love between two people is shown to be as transient as a cloud. The trilogy's preoccupations, alienation, abandonment, the fear of death, are here brought to their resting point.
The five close out a trilogy that follows Like Blood in Water and The Future of Giraffes. Read in order, the three are one structure in fifteen parts, the most sustained demonstration of the omission method Tarnawsky built across his late career.