DECEPTIVE ELYSIUM,
OR THE LAND OF FALSE DESIRES

Before you is a story where familiar reality intertwines with a hidden truth that the writer has resolved to reveal to the world. A master of the pen creates a cycle of tales, each devoted to one of the deadly sins — sins that not only live in people's hearts and show through in their deeds, but also walk our mortal earth in an entirely human guise.

The writer's friend Karl at first takes these stories for flights of the author's imagination. But the deeper he sinks into the manuscripts, the more strongly he senses that they concern more than mere characters.

Where does the line run between literary invention and what hides within people and unfolds around us? And is Karl himself not a part of the very stories he reads so avidly?

Imagine a book that holds within it scenes set in a prison, a psychiatric hospital, an aeroplane, a portrait of the prehistoric Universe and much more that seems impossible to combine. Each part quite literally hurls the reader into a new reality. The author now carries us to another place or time, now plunges us into the depths of a troubled mind or the anguish-wrapped soul of a character. And the more pages the reader devours, the more of the connections and interweavings they manage to catch — connections that ultimately merge into a single, finished thought.

Using the genre of philosophical fantasy, the author tears apart mental clichés and the settled perception of the true and the false, reveals the other side of the coin — that which we never pause to consider, never notice — and gently leads readers toward answers to the eternal, fundamental questions of being.

The search for the road to oneself is best begun by overcoming formulaic thinking and grasping who you are not. Loosened fences tend to buckle and fall — just as the boundaries of one’s own worldview, once cracked, may evaporate, opening the reader’s eyes to something greater…