In the experimental literary novella, The Obedient, set in America in the early 1950s, the young man Sand is esteemed and thought to be alluringly void because he is docile and does not speak his mind. Because Sand is seen as nothingness and death, those who love him repay him in nothingness and death. A man named Midas falls in love with Sand by trying to fall in love with his sister. After an affair between Sand and Midas, which leaves Sand weakened and driven and living in his father's vicarage, Sand's elder brother Vinny, an alcoholic spiritually haunted by the beauty and eroticism of nihilism, becomes obsessed with Sand's and Midas' love and attempts to double down on the foregoing erasures of world-substance by way of an act of violence against his family.