Picked this up at a bookstore because of the cover alone. And I'll be honest, I drifted in and out of this plot-wise, but the end gripped me, and the descriptions always took me there. Take this close of the opening paragraph: "With a sense of resignation, I take upon me once more the heavy flesh, dully aching in every part and disintegrated though it is. I've been sleeping with arms and legs askew, in the posture of a man reluctant to be reminded either of his nature or of the situation in which he finds himself." The gruesome, the body and the anguish of living in it, the macabre, disgust, the textures of mist and sinews and the eerie groans and whistles and the weight of the world, it is all described beautifully, viscerally... I felt seen, understood by all those descriptions peppered through the novel. Whenever I drifted out, I'd get caught again by a sentence that took my breath away.

The subjects too are fascinating: how death and our obsessive coping with it can infect the family, how madness can make the ones you love seem alien, can make yourself seem alien, how we become imbued in networks of other peoples' judgements and how we find ways to escape it.