Ben is on a work trip, away from his wife and three young children, when he decides to take a hike through the woods by his hotel. Ben sees a man with a Rottweiler face disposing of a corpse, and flees into the woods with the dog man pursuing him.
The next thing he knows, he's trapped in a surreal world halfway between a nightmare and a video game. It often involves distorted reflections of his own past - Ben has a scar on his face from a Rottweiler bite and he keeps getting attacked by Rottweiler-faced men, an old lover appears at the age she was when he last saw her, and he befriends a talking crab that knows a suspicious amount about him. He has to stay on the path, or he'll die. A mysterious old woman gives him tasks and tells him the only way he can get home is to find the Producer. Things appear and disappear in a very dreamlike manner, the scene shifting from a cannibal giant's castle to a hovercraft to a desert. After each ordeal, he gets a banquet with champagne.
This extremely weird book is a bit like a dreamlike, horror-inflected
Alice in Wonderland for bros. I almost gave up on it halfway through - it was so "one random thing after another and the whole thing is clearly not real" that I got bored - but that's when something happened that intrigued me enough to continue. It doesn't need to be as long as it is - it's a short book that would have been better as a novelette - but the ending, while not explaining all that much, still manages to be satisfying.
I wouldn't re-read this - the actual reading experience often felt like a slog - but it was definitely different and had some good twists, so I'm not sorry I read it. I suspect there's some overlap in readership between this and
Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Don't read the spoilers if there's any chance you'll actually read the book.
( Spoilers! )Probably it's all a metaphor for life.
Content notes: Horror-typical gore and gross-outs.
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