A priest remakes himself from animal flesh. A land surveyor travels into the earth's crust in search of a boulder. Hauled for centuries it forms a rut, the longest sentence in recorded history.

Black Vellum is a Nietzschean experiment. The priest symptomizes Nietzsche's analysis and serves as an embodiment, a deviant incarnation, of the philosopher himself. Other figures are encountered in the content of their thought; Schopenhauer, Cioran, Freud, and Bataille enter as minor actors. None are named as such, and their intuitions are allowed to interanimate. Most readings and re-readings of established figures appear bound to the task of moderation, this book attends to their derangements.

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"The intellect was only first produced as a result of this diminishment of perception, writes Ansgar Allen in Black Vellum. This is an exquisitely written philosophical tale about human civilization as the quest for order, measurement, and automation-and perhaps, about how nihilism and despair have always fed our fantasies of humanoid machines." Germ