In the first section of An Emergent Skull, Bede Skinner is nightmarishly obsessed with his daughter, whom he thinks is carnivorous and ineffable like God. Later in the book, a group of siblings in their childhood try to improve the world by reversing rituals they read about in an anthropology book. One of the siblings, Gavrila, falls ill and dies from having eaten a mouse's heart. Lawrence, the oldest boy, in adulthood perceives a thick high wall behind his parents' property, a room with a point of light that tells him that after his older sister dies of a kind of leprosy (which they have all contracted, apparently from guilt), he must excarnate her skull and deposit it on the other side of the wall in order to give her soul an immortality in heaven. The book is skeletal, short, abortive; the skull of the book is its nonexistence. They try to save themselves by inventing rituals; the world is old and life is still not enough to silence the birth-cry that is human longing. (The first step is taken by automatically screaming.) An experimental literary novel, An Emergent Skull could be seen as a work of absurdism or surrealism.