"A Great Phantom Park rises magnificently out of a thick cloud of Cannabis Indica smoke—until a stiff maritime breeze blows it all away to reveal the hopeless ruins underneath the illusion.
Manhattan's Battery Park serves as The Sun Temple of the book's title—and it is the narrator's desperate mission to maintain this grand myth.
But the concurrence of a heat wave, a rare bout of Summer fever, and a tainted sacrament all combine to push this already overheated equation towards psychosis and destruction.
A telepathic grief infuses every page of this relentless inquisition of a book. Everyone eventually finds themselves on trial: the sun itself is ultimately judged as a miserable failure, and the moon is revealed to be as scheming and duplicitous as a Mata Hari.
And though the sun is forced to retreat in shame and defeat, and debilitated constellations fall
tragically from the night sky—the entire cosmos wrecked—the narrator invariably awakes the following morning refreshed, with a positive outlook, and the delicious anticipation of putting the torch to his blood once again!
As we navigate the scorched pages of this feverish book, we are reminded at times of DeQuincey's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater"—and at others of the tall tales of Baron Munchausen. There are echoes of Doestoyevsky's "Underground Man", and Pessoa's "Book of Disquiet"—and a spectral Manhattan can take on qualities of the old Prague ghetto as portrayed in Meyrink's "The Golem"."
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