Early ReviewersPersonne

In this sequel to Traitor Comet, we follow Antonin Artaud as his successful Theatre Alfred Jarry provokes the outrage and protests of the Surrealists, led by Andre Breton.

The usually cheerful Robert Desnos descends into drugs and depression due to Breton's insistence he join the French Community Party, which Artaud rejects outright. We meet Kiki of Montparnasse, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Lee Miller. Geoff, watching with alarm the growing influence of the National Socialist German Worker's Party, realizes he is being stalked - probably by Helmut Heumer, his former Austrian neighbor.

Despite Geoff's best efforts, his mysterious past and Austria's precarious future violently collide to endanger everyone he loves.

Before punk, before the Beats, before existentialism, and beyond Surrealism there were two visionaries, two rebels, and two friends, Antonin Artaud and Robert Desnos.

It is 1926. Geoff Weidmann, a troubled young Austrian, is dragged by his elderly father from his lone farmhouse to Paris to live with Geoff's brother Franz and his French wife. Haunted by his troubled past and by his memories of the Great War, Geoff encounters in Paris a group of young men and women who likewise abhor war, mindless patriotism, and bourgeois conformity. Geoff meets the surrealist poets Antonin Artaud and Robert Desnos, original thinkers who are resisting both society's strictures and the pressure put on them by the founder of the surrealist movement, Andre Breton, to join the Community Party. Initially repulsed by Artaud, Geoff comes to admire this strange and troubled poet and easily befriends the jovial, irreverent Desnos. However, Geoff is haunted by a secret - had he been insane, or had he actually murdered a man and buried him on his Austrian farm?

Written to incorporate the imagery, concerns, and conflicts found in the works of Artaud and Desnos themselves, this novel is the first in a series of four dedicated to the lives and friendship of Antonin Artaud and Robert Desnos.