In the first paragraph of Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist the omniscient narrator suggests that nothing is as it seems, that perhaps this is a phantasmagoric imagination, a conceit of illusion, "a book with no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, people by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and willfully bizarre." The narrator is exactly right.

Review of Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist