A Box of Dreams

Madsen writes a looping dream in which famous psychoanalysts, confessional perverts, ubiquitous anxieties, persistent hungers, and erotic longings weave together convincingly for the reader and the nameless narrator.

Choice quote: "Inside the packed cathedral all was sweet odors, cool shadows, the glint and glimmer of gold, the shy presence of the numinous amid the interplay of darkness and light; polychrome saints looked down from their lofty niches: St Parthexus with his gilded phallus, St Romo and the blind lion, St Averina carrying her lacerated breasts on a silver platter; votive candles winked before gaudy shrines; above the High Altar was suspended a huge icon of the Keys-in-Triplicate, wreathed in the smoke of ambergris, show more rosemary, cedarwood and myrtle. Great shafts of air bisected the tenebrous interior, their passage and dispersal echoing the whispered supplications of a thousand worshippers. Ranks of gorgeously-robed acolytes were already assembled on the marble sanctuary, which was inlaid with lozenges of onyx and porphyry." show less