In this book Yates's persona is called Sono Nis, a name which is drawn from Indian legend and also the name which he chose for his press. These stories are all fantasies that take place within the consciousnesses of the characters. In "The Passage of Sono Nis," the first story, the narrator sees a flood of people jammed tightly together running down the street outside his apartment building. He dives over the pile of bodies in the entrance way to join the sea of flesh and runs with them into extinction or oblivion, Yates does not make clear which.
In the second story, "The Broadcaster," the narrator is a disc jockey on a rock program who broadcasts twenty-four hours a day and gradually disappears into the acoustical tile of the studio ceiling. The other stories are about strange obsessive states, and the collection ends with the story "An Inquest into the Disappearance and Possible Death of (The Late) Sono Nis, Photographer." Sono Nis has become an abstraction, a negative, who disappears by going to his darkroom. The tone of the collection is enigmatic, sometimes infuriatingly oblique as Yates explores the recesses of consciousness and the limits of form.
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