A budding cult classic that dramatically splits the reviewers. Which side will you be on?

“A BIG, JOYOUS BOOK, WORTH READING SIMPLY FOR THE FUN OF IT.”—BLUE INK REVIEW

“A ZANY, INVENTIVE, AND MULTILAYERED FEVER DREAM OF MURDER AND MAYHEM”—KIRKUS REVIEWS

A seamless melding of (i) the intricate plotting of Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose, (ii) the side-splitting humor of John Kennedy Toole in A Confederacy of Dunces, and (iii) the fabulous world of William Blake.

In 1977, Ickey Jerusalem, San Francisco’s golden-boy poet laureate (based on Blake), is found dead in a locked, first-class toilet on an arriving red-eye flight.

Ded Smith, a desperately unhappy, intelligent philistine with a highly developed philosophy to match, is called in to investigate the poet’s death. Thus begins a series of hilarious encounters with the members of Jerusalem’s coterie (updated amalgams of characters from Blake’s work).

Ded soon realizes that to find out what happened, he must not only collect his usual detective’s clues but also, despite his own poetically challenged outlook, get into the dead poet’s mind.

Fighting his way through blasphemous funerals, drug-induced dreams, poetry-charged love-making, offbeat philosophical discussions, and much, much more, he begins to piece together Jerusalem’s (Blake’s) seductive, all-encompassing metaphysics.

But by then, the attempts to kill Ded and the others have begun.