Fables of Heartfelt Deviance

A trickster called Evolution wreaks havoc on Intelligent Design, transforming an ethereal divine being into the grumpy geriatric God we all know and love. Sirens sing nostalgic songs that lure sailors back to the safety of their homes, robbing them of the thrill of adventure. A supreme almighty deity, oblivious to the perils of skewed power dynamics, starts a reckless affair with a nun from a secluded monastery, built on the site of a primordial mythical river whose waters demand a virgin sacrifice. An overbearing mother concocts a fanciful narrative to protect her son from the presumed consequences of her internalized shame and inadvertently inspires him to tear a hole into the fabric of reality with the sheer power of his quixotic libido.

Welcome to a universe where every solution to a problem, big or small, is a challenge to the ever-vigilant, all-knowing, omnipotent force called Chronic Dissatisfaction.

Beginning as a whimsical compendium of bite-sized fables exploring the repressed passions of traditional folkloric families, and ending as an epic homoerotic story cycle, the third installment in Yanko Tsvetkov’s Apophenia series trades the bustling cosmopolitanism of the first two volumes for the supernatural idealism of the countryside. There, the unholy union of unexamined parochialism and sublimated wanderlust breeds fixations and superstitions that prove irresistible to everyone but a handful of outcasts, who can either stay and risk stigmatization or head to the unknown, in search of the home they’ve been denied at birth.