THIRTEEN QUESTION METHOD

A visit from a troubled female neighbor kicks off a strange series of events for a man who struggles to distinguish between reality and tulpas—"invention[s] of my mind."

The unnamed man, who is divorced and unemployed, lives alone in an unglamorous section of Hollywood with "nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it." He knows his kohl-eyed visitor, Corinna, only from her daily bouts of screaming. She says she has come to apologize for them, but after making herself oddly at home, she pleads for his help in her inheritance fight with her hated stepmother, Sylvia. For $200, he agrees to pay a visit to Sylvia to shake her up but then quickly melts in her haughty presence. On a subsequent uninvited visit to her lavish home, he learns more than he wants to know via a flash drive containing a video of a dominatrix-clad Sylvia whipping her bound and gagged late husband. With wildfires raging on the outskirts of the city—"purgatory" for the protagonist, who gets badly clawed himself—Corinna meets an untimely end. Or at least he thinks she's dead after burying her in a shallow grave. Reminiscent of Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things, with its unreliable, unnamed narrator and twisted turns, and taking cues from classic noir and devil-at-the-crossroad blues, the novel is one long blast of existential despair. Ulin's frequent needle drops and minilectures on blues songs (including "Corinne, Corinna") weakly engage with the narrative. And deriving the title of the book and its 13 chapters from a Chuck Berry novelty tune is too clever by half. But the ill wind whipping through these pages leaves its mark.

The concept doesn't work, but the visions are intense.