As a staff photographer at Bellevue hospital in Manhattan, Clarence Dmitri Larkin is exposed to the fraying underbelly of New York City. Drawn in by the stories of the sick, the lost, and the insane, Larkin's own dark impulses lead him through the streets of Brooklyn's shadowy warehouse district.

Increasingly isolated from the world around him, Larkin falls in with a disturbed cell of outcasts. Their ringleader, empowered by confused visions of grandeur and revolution, launches an outlandish scheme to plant an atomic bomb in the catacombs under Times Square.

Narrated with unsettling plausibility, Bell's debut novel demonstrates the remarkable literary skill celebrated in his later novels, such as Soldier's Joy and The Year of Silence. With "real brilliance . . . full of fire . . . Bell provides promise: promise of his own talent and promise that young American writers are not all retreating from 'big' subjects" (The New York Times).

"Every sentence [Bell] writes is a joy. His power is exhilarating." --The New Yorker