The Man Who Noticed Everything is a collection of dark, cerebral stories of the American grotesque that light up hidden corners of the individual and national consciousness.

Ruined dandies, obsessive loners, young men at loose ends, and more than a few unaffiliated supernatural entities navigate with varying degrees of success the literal and figurative labyrinths of Adrian Van Young's neo-Gothic universe. A chicken-hawk tobacco farmer in Depression-era rural Georgia welcomes a dangerous drifter into his diminished circle of trust. An amnesiac burn-victim hoping to escape his dubious past forges a series of ragged connections with the occupants of a small town after joining a crew of day laborers hired to exhume a graveyard on a rich man's property. A lovesick son of the South pursues an unknown nemesis through Civil War–era Virginia, attended by three grotesque spirits who prognosticate in riddles on the outcome of his quest. A man so quintessentially average-looking that he cannot be perceived by others finds himself the subject of a macabre plot that musters in the tunnels of the New York City subway system.