Incoherent, which might be excusable from a plot perspective, but even on a sentence-to-sentence level, the goal seems to be performative opacity. Showy, clunky, slow, unpleasant to read on the most granular level.

In spite of all this, I’d genuinely be interested in seeing this author’s installation work—there’s a combustible volume of ideas here that I do imagine could be expressed evocatively in other formats.

The passages that worked best for me were often those that went deep into tangents—Dracula, the tentacular dread of Cthulhu, The 3-Body Problem, Jodorowky’s Dune. The way that some of these things were woven into the story made for interesting sidebars, and since there was so much more of an anchor to reality or familiarity, I felt like I could sink into them in a way that I couldn’t with the core narrative, which I’d still be hard-pressed to summarize.