Bob has spent the past several years maintaining a successful upholstery business, but in between re-covering sofas he’s also been working in a sporadic fashion to build a machine that will communicate with the dead. Along these lines, he’s gotten more or less nowhere. Then two surprising things happen: He receives an important message from a dog, and next, his old girlfriend, Yvonne, re-enters his life, bringing with her a daughter named Dee Dee. It doesn’t take long from then on until really bad things happen, and suddenly the perfecting of the Communicator, as he calls his invention, becomes a necessity.

Toward You completes the trilogy begun with Girl Factory and Erased and is part of a continuing examination of the relationship between this world and the next. Amid the usual Krusoesque see-saw of longing, distraction, mistakes, disaster, and hope, the novel also explores the value of storytelling itself.