In nightmare prose, a journey through the Wildlands searching for the lost Black Presence as Jack and a mutant Tedesco, who looks like a bear, also try to overthrow the hegemony of the lures and talk about Mother Earth and Lady Nature since there's all this ""message. . . to impart."" None of the action the genre originally assumed in spite of all the farouche fauna -- crabs and rats and robots, everything except King Kong.