Hannibal Lecther was not this evil...

This is perhaps the darkest tale I have ever read. It begins in mirth and ends in death. It explores the depths of the human conscious and reveals that perhaps you are not the good person that you believe yourself to be. One who believes himself to be a saint may in fact be the devils own lovechild.

Through the personalities encountered we learn the futility of too much play and not enough learning. And conversely we learn of the futility of too much learning and not enough play (wasn't there a Star Trek episode about that?)

Each of the characters but one is a lesson in extremes. We see the beautiful and the good, the corrupt and the practical. We learn that magic is that which we do not wish to see or sometimes merely the unthought of. We see that every face is only a mask.

This is not a book about a hideous hunchback or a beautiful gypsy girl. Rather it is a treatise on the heart of humankind. It is all that is dark in humanity. We are creatures of reason and we know what it is that we do. But so long as we are warm and fed, when the great tide of humanity washes over one lone innocent creature, we do not care to know that is we who swept it into oblivion.