Instead of working on my novel this weekend, which was my original plan, I spent all of Sunday browsing through Rising Up and Rising Down. I still need to pinch myself to believe that this book exists. It's the first book to give me nightmares since House of Leaves; I dozed off around nine o'clock and dreamed about Lincoln's assassination. Although this book really can't be compared to anything, a few obvious peers do come to mind: not just The Golden Bough and The Anatomy of Melancholy and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but also the Summa Theologica, even though RURD is much less orderly.

But here's the scariest and most seductive comparison of all: Pale Fire. Reading RURD, I had the sudden insight that perhaps this is a gigantic novel disguised as an encyclopedia, narrated by a fictional "William T. Vollmann" whose personality keeps peeking through the diagrams and quotations and lists of atrocities. When seen in the right light, Rising Up and Rising Down might be revealed as a monstrous confession. There's something positively Nabokovian in the way that Vollmann hints at autobiographical revelations to come, and I keep getting glimpses of a hidden narrative in those frequent footnotes and asides when Vollmann's treatise slips into the first person. There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.