After the death of his wife and unborn daughter, to live and go on living is a burden. Nay, a curse... August Amery takes to his iron steed and rides west without hesitation, and without stopping he arrives at the end of the continent with only one final leap on his mind. In the thralls of that suicidal jump, August is whisked away to the Catacombs of the Infinite. He is left to discover for himself whether he is dead in Hell or Heaven or something else, dreaming, has skipped out of the simulation, or lost in some unimaginable dimension.At the end of a lone dirt path, he finds a Mountainous Pyramid stretching to all horizons, and in it he finds seven doors. In entering each one, he finds a different macabre world of unlogic and impossibilities. He has no choice but to press on with an entirely new Existential Awareness and in his yearning for answers, he meets those that wish to help him, those that wish to lock him into devices of a never-ending torture, and all sorts in between. His psyche is continuously harassed by the lack of any reasonable understanding of all that transpires, and his progress mauled by the memories of that gruesome night not so long ago in which he lost his love... Yet he presses on.Throughout this novel of Lardner's own Gritty Transcendental Realism, August portrays, reluctantly at times, a Dimensionally Lost Hero, a victim to the Cosmic Glitch, left to find what lies at the base of all things material and immaterial, for that is the only way to achieve what he set out to achieve with his initial suicidal action, some semblance of peace. God? Consciousness? Nothing? The Void? The Source? "Am I dead? Was I ever even alive? Is this Heaven, Hell, Nothing? Is this moment actually happening or just a dream?"
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