...A book that is compared - no more and no less - with Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast"....A city outside of time and space, Ambergris, in which the features, realities and legends of Constantinople, Venice, London and Paris are intertwined. Here is a young priest, exhausted forbidden love for a mysterious stranger, becomes the involuntary cause of a monstrous massacre...Here a malicious historian creates AMAZING comments on a very dubious chronicle about the founding of Ambergris...Here a mad writer denies the reality of the world around him - but TOO willingly admits to committing an EXTREMELY SPECIAL murder...Here are the motives of Nabokov and Eco, Lovecraft and Melville are mixed into an INCREDIBLE cocktail of FANTASY AND PHANTASMAGORIA!