This is a deeply unsettling book about a path that slowly curves away from normalcy, and the things that people tell themselves to pretend that the curve isn't there. The prose is pristine: Alam is meticulous in his descriptions of the mundane as it slowly slips toward the unsettling, the horrific, and the unthinkable. I wouldn't say that this book is totally bleak, though: only mostly bleak, and also phenomenal.