Lucas, a failing student, urgently seeks out his father Nick, psychedelic-era wreck and self-proclaimed channel for "Qabalistic knowledge", now confined to a mental hospital alongside Wolfbane, a forgotten rock & roll icon. Pauline, ultra-rationalist mother and burnt-out teacher, dreads their encounter.Her nightmares seem realised when Nick escapes and Lucas disappears – to enter a parallel world, peopled by a rogues' gallery of bohemian riff-raff and sacred harlots, whose operations – artistic, criminal or magickal – are scribed with hallucinatory intensity. He undergoes poetic – and erotic – initiation.It's a story worm-holed with dark wit and satiric allusions. The manias of an imploding alternate world are only a modulation of our more familiar obsessions, here at the base levels of The Qabalistic Tree, amid the broken shells and debris – the Qliphoth – of our Creation.