We can view Blevins as contemporary with Melville's Confidence Man. Or perhaps with Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. Kathy Acker? Or, my favorite: B. Traven's The Death Ship with its motto above the entry to the engine room: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." That quote was applied by Dante in The Inferno for Pope Celestine V whose cowardice "opened the door where evil entered the Church." For Blevins, it applies to the Maga Ship of State.