Petir, a bureaucrat whose job is to deny insurance claims, is stalked by an angry claimant who blames him for his lost compensation and Petir becomes caught up in a web of dangerous political intrigue K.C. Frederick sets his debut novel in a place where the sun hardly ever shines: an unnamed, fictional Eastern European country that seems to exist in a state of perpetual precipitation. The protagonist of this tale is Petir, a minor bureaucrat in a monolithic state institution, whose job it is to deny insurance claims. This leads to trouble when an injured claimant blames Petir personally for his lost compensation and begins to stalk him. But an angry peasant is only one of the hapless hero's troubles: he has also become embroiled in the messy affairs of a cross-dressing acquaintance who soon ends up dead; his ex-wife has become a lesbian; and a tragic occurrence from his childhood continues to haunt him. Against all this Kafkaesque absurdity, Frederick paints a sobering portrait of totalitarian society in upheaval, and in the process grants his harried and resolutely ordinary Petir a moment of extraordinary grace as he makes a small but defiantly humane gesture that will change him forever. Somewhere in Eastern Europe, somewhere between Kafka and Orwell, a corporate flunky awakens to life and his governments stranglehold on itin a bleakly poetic, slow-moving debut by storywriter Frederick. Petir receives a phone call from Eduard, whom he once knew (but not well), asking him to rendezvous in Eduard's stead with a lover, and for reasons he doesn't begin to understand, Petir agrees. The woman is fetching but distant, serving to deepen Petir's dissatisfaction with his lotthat of a divorced, apolitical workaholic. In his confusion, he takes another unfathomable step: he writes personally to one of the pesky claimants whose hopeswhatever they may beit is really Petirs job to squelch. For his trouble he receives an eyeless bird's head and peasant curses from the claimant, Pund, a loner who lost his leg in an accident for which Petir's company refuses to provide compensation. Then Eduard is killed (in women's clothing) on the edge of a lawless, teeming refugee encampment outside their city, and Petir realizes that he'll never be able to return to his former state of blissful ignorance. Pund harasses and assaults him, his ex-wife reenters his life as a lesbian, and Eduard's lover begins to take an interest in him. Finally, a repressed childhood memory kicks in, and he begins to come to terms with the fact that his mother had sent him out of the house just before she blew it up with his father and herself inside. As the states true totalitarian nature grows more apparent every day, and civil unrest intensifies, Petir endures his various other torments, then decides to risk a small but exquisite humanitarian gesture, reaching out to nemesis Pund in an act that redeems them both. A novel with such a full cargo of lonely souls needs more wind in its sails; this one's becalmed in a Sargasso Sea of introspective flotsam and loose ends. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "brilliantly disconcerting... the strangest, most beguiling effect is how it begins to remind us of where we ourselves live." --Peter Rock, Philadelphia Inquirer K.C. FREDERICK has published 4 novels with the Permanent Press. INLAND (2006) won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England award. His short stories have appeared in many journals, a good number have been cited in the annual collections of Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prizes and several have been anthologized. In addition to this recognition, his work has won him a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Born and raised in Detroit, K.C. Frederick lives in the Boston area.