Inspired by Francisco de Goya's profoundly unsettling masterpiece, 'Los Disparates' ('The Follies'), Daniel O'Reilly's
Everything is Cake
offers twenty-two short stories that translate the artist's incisive, grotesque, and absurd realism into literary form. This collection is a descent into the nature of folly-a "light" madness where the horrific and the nonsensical rupture the mirror-image of proud human Reason. Within these pages, characters are thrown into bizarre existence, abandoned in worlds drafted hastily by a distracted creator. A man seeking escape finds himself literally trapped and seduced by the ancient walls of a city. A captured military drone is reprogrammed with poetry, taught how to be sad so it can teach other drones to give up the will to fight. A birthday party guest begins to suspect that the furniture, the food, and even the other people are not what they seem. What begins as a pilgrimage into the heart of a great artist's vision becomes an abduction of the senses. O'Reilly holds up a splintered mirror to our world, forcing us to confront the existential paradoxes and monstrous faces that look back when we least expect it. For as Goya warned, "The sleep of reason produces monsters.