The author's second novel, The Book of Days consists of a short story told each day by a man trying to talk himself back to sanity. A kind of literary sampler quilt, these daily inventions emulate the styles of everything from traditional ghost stories to the works of O'Henry and James Whitcomb Riley, from westerns to fifties science fiction to boy's own adventure stories. As a sequence illustrating the narrator's deep internal struggle, these dark stories take on additional weight, making each one a sharp shock that builds to an electrifying whole.