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plaster tape across his mouth he can’t speak. Who imprisoned him? The other crime lord, Grisamentum. Grisamentum is in violent quest of Billy and his allies in order to get hold of the kraken (or more precisely the apparently stolen or disappeared giant squid from the Museum of Natural History). He believes he can restore his own life by combining with the ink of the squid, and can do this by sympathetic magic or magic of literal proximity, whereby if something is near or even concerns another thing, it is on the way to becoming that thing. Grisamentum plans to melt the ink off the writings about the kraken that he has had his minions steal, and blend with that ink too. It all stems from a kind of power in metonymy, or in contiguity.
    By this stage we need to invoke another aspect of the world of the novel. This is that there are no gaps in existence, only gradations that may be bridged or used as stepping-stones. It is a Derridean world of slidings and deferred differences, not so much interdependences as overlappings and metamorphoses.There is no absolute or broad division between death and life. Grisamentum is in process of coming back to life, by way of the ink of the squid and even of the writings about the squid or the kraken, added to his ashes. He utilizes “an interzone closer to life” (that is, closer than his apparent state of being dead), “a threshold-life” (401). Dane comes back to life after being tortured to death. The squid, dead and preserved in the huge glass tank of fluid at the museum, stolen, teleported to a truck, thence to the embassy of the Sea (literally thus: a place at which this vast power may be contacted) and back to the museum, comes to twitching life, dies again in self-sacrifice: transpositions, transformations. The way to spirit (that is, aliveness with more capacities than aliveness has in our world) is through matter, and often the grungiest of matter at that. Familiars or golems may be made out of “a hand-sized clot of mange and clumpy hair” (215) for instance; magicians and esoterics animate and give purpose to a flock of pigeons or a cloud of dead leaves. And even though the plot is largely concerned with keeping the missing squid from a bunch of criminals who are capable of reckless violence and torture, there is a sense in which no distinction exists between good and evil, because both sides are united by a similar kind of manic energy. No one is really in control of the oncoming apocalypse, and both sides have to become manipulators of the forces and factions of alternative London.
    The ultimate villain, the one revealed after all the preemptions, fakes, false leads, and inconclusive, supposedly climactic battles, is a certain Vardy, who has no moral character, or at least none that has any kind of manifestation comparable to the highly colored nastiness of characters like Grisamentum and the Tattoo. Vardy is the anomaly among all these personages whose anomalousness is bound into the rules of transformation that otherwise prevail in the novel’s apparently anarchic universe, but he is a mere shadow of the resolving third terms we have noted in earlier texts; it is the reimagining of imagined apocalypse as the scene of a dialogue between humans and universe that brings about resolution in this novel.
    Each of the novels that have been discussed rethinks and restages the relations of the ordinary and the anomalous in our contemporary, apocalypse-obsessed culture. It is the value of the ordinary, and the threats to it from contemporary culture, that shapes each novel. Each arguably offers a democratic imagination of apocalypse, or apocalypses.
    We can observe a shift from The Lathe of Heaven through Girlfriend in a Coma to Kraken , though in each case the governing condition is that reality is the product of human dreams. The struggle against the apprehension of futurecalamities gives rise to guilt and anxiety in George Orr, the main character in The