Barbarians

The year is 1917. Three men flee America aboard a mule transport ship, each running from a different ghost. Carfax, a soldier of fortune with blood on his hands; Harry Stent, an affluent adventurer whose wealth has purchased nothing but emptiness; and Jacques Wayland, a writer whose war wounds cut deeper than the physical. They are barbarians in a world that has suddenly made savagery respectable, men out of step with both the jingoistic home front and the mechanistic slaughter of the trenches. Chambers, better known for the dreamlike terrors of The King in Yellow, brings his gift for atmospheric unease to this quieter, bitter meditation. What emerges is a novel about men untethered from the civilization they once believed in, searching for meaning in an age that has abandoned the very concept. It captures a specific moment of disillusionment, that peculiar restlessness of a generation asking what humanity means when war has stripped it bare.