Steps

I focused the flashlight toward the sound. A large cage was suspended from the rafters. Formed of metal grating, it hung down on a heavy rope which passed through a ring secured to the roof. The rope fed down the wall and was fastened to a large cleat.

The strange cry came again : my light beat against the cage. A white hand stretched toward me through the bars; behind it a head, dim but clearly framed in untidy tresses of fair hair, caught the light.... A naked woman sat behind the grating, babbling meaningless words, staring at me with wide watery eyes.

Steps unfolds through a series of extraordinarily realistic scenes—immediate, vivid, often brutal—like the separate but integral elements in a Bosch painting or Goya's searing etchings on war.

Steps is the log of a strange, compelling odyssey. Its shattering episodes, which portray a man's life, gradually reveal—beneath the mask of convention and morality—a self freed for pure violence and absolute sexuality

Steps, with its fascinating range of characters and situations and its uncanny penetration into the darkest realm of existence, lures the reader on a challenging journey into a lonely, harrowing region where the mind must find its own order.