A while back, I extolled the merits of Coffee House Press, an exceptional independent publisher whose work I consistently enjoy. And it was to Coffee House that I turned after gorging myself on confections of escapist lit, like Matt Ruff’s Public Works Trilogy and Bill Willingham’s bah-rilliant Fables series of graphic novels, that I tend to consume during times of stress. I needed a palette cleanser and Coffee House had a novel among its fall releases—The Meat and Spirit Plan by Salek Saterstrom. Perfect, he thought, with ironic foreshadowing.

Perhaps it was my fault. Maybe I’ve simply grown too old for nihilism, maybe there’s something about crossing thirty relatively intact that renders nihilism a quaint preoccupation of youth. And though I’ve identified myself as a feminist since my sophomore year of college LO those many years ago, it doesn’t make the nihilism any more valuable when narrated by a woman. I hated it coming from the boys like Bret Easton Ellis and Nick McDonnell, and wasn’t convinced otherwise by Saterstrom just because the object of rape actually gets to speak. This is a coming-of-age tale set on a downward slope, through booze and passionless sex and disease and, frankly, Kathy Acker took it further and did it better a decade ago.

Which is not to say The Meat and Spirit Plan is not wholly without merit. I enjoyed its disjointed, poetic structure on the page, following a linear narrative with block, justified paragraphs, reading very much as an epic. And some of the discussions of art and sex and love and our relationship to our bodies were beautiful and rich. But the narrator is so detached from her life we see little more than her impressions, and while given to understand how gifted she is, we are denied any access to the genius of the genius we are asked to watch decay.

Even all of that could have been forgiven but for one thing. It is a personal prejudice I have, born of bitter experience, against ham-handed framing devices, and most especially so when they are revealed in the final moments. The exquisite The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq and Frank Wynne had absolutely transfixed me until the final chapter, three pages into which I gave up, content to erase the premise that the preceding chapters had been a historical document from my memory of this otherwise excellent work. Special Topics in Calamity Physics was already dead to me when the pop quiz of the final chapter danced on its grave, though the sin was no less grave. I can only hope that Saterstrom’s final paragraphs were forced upon her by the demonseed lovechild of M. Night Shamalamadingdong and Gordon Lish, because, really, I could have stomached “and then I woke up” better.

And yet I’m not unsatisfied. Maybe it was really the taste of bile that I needed to wash my palette. In which case, Coffee House served up a perfectly acrid cup of Joe.