Abstract

The novel begins on July 4th of the year 2000 in Kansas City, Kansas, at 7 a.m. Yves Antichrist, the nom de guerre of an eighteen-year-old who has been living on the streets for the last two years, begins his day waking on the stairs before a department store in a luxury outdoor shopping center in central Kansas City. Over the next 24 hours Yves undertakes an unreal pilgrimage through the underworlds of the city, searching—through myth and reality—for a way to live and a gender to belong to. Yves narrates this search as he undertakes an arduous struggle to discover how, or if, to continue living. In a quest for self-definition and sanity, Yves must confront the demons of his past and present and navigate a landscape of predatory dreams, drug addiction, and poverty.

Myth, madness, and alienation are central themes of this work. In terms of both style and content the story works with extremes of reality and unreality exploring the complexity of gender and belief at the turn of the 21st Century. It is a novel about the search for community and the trauma of social alienation. This is a coming-of-age story against a backdrop of fear, violence, and dark beauty.