The Cabinet

Trust me, you don't know where this one is going. We open with Ludger Sylbaris, the lone survivor of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelee who escaped to Mexico where he posthumously wrote a book about the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre spouting badger tails, or having two penises. Is this early evidence of symptomers or a clue to the raving paranoia of those locked in their own tiny cages?

Symptomers, it's posited, are humanity's next stage, a new species of people who consume gasoline, eat steel, edit their memories, or have trees growing out from them. And they're all there in Cabinet 13 for Deok-Geun to discover. The book moves along in a series of vignettes that linger at the edges of surreal and disaffected. Someone wants to become a cat, someone else spends half a year methodically drinking 12,000 beers, there's a gluttonous episode in a sushi bar and a violent interrogation. But why? It's a mad, mad world.