A novel of ideas about depression, death and resurrection. Reno Antonin, a middle-aged man, is rapidly falling into a deep depression ignited by a series of medical crises and fueled by the repressed memory of a dark event that happened decades before. When psychotherapy fails him, he searches for other means to resolve his problem. Finally, he meets a strange group of people who offer him an unorthodox solution. The more times he's been anesthetized for his surgeries, the more he's convinced that he has an idea of what death might be like. But if death were like what a lot of people believe, that some form of their consciousness lives on forever, he'd be damned afraid of dying. "Shame on you. Those 'spirits' are manifestations of your imagination, churned up by some conflict in your subconscious." "Important clues are buried under protective layers, shadows, built up by your conscious and subconscious mind." "I agree. A total loss of consciousness simulates death." "When you awake, your consciousness is recreated, reborn from nothing. You won't be the same; your old consciousness is 'dead.'"