Weird. In fact, a review going backwards seems the best and safest interaction with this piece. So – Part Three is an academic essay full of Pseuds Corner candidates, that adds too many layers onto what we've just read. It wasn't exactly fun. Part Two is a strange blend of found quotes, academic messages, maps of the underground and images of bats. It all relates – somehow – to a certain place in Mexico, where from the 1930s onwards a lot of mercury mining was done – which was great for the trade with America who was desperately short of that for WWII, but not so great since: pollution, lethal chemicals and so on. Talking of which – it seems to have also been the location of a meteor strike, and since the mining industry collapsed, become an illegal dumping ground for barrels and barrels of PCBs. Oh, and all of Parts Two and Three are printed white on black, because nothing.

All of which brings us to Part One, which is a graphic novel element – one small window of three lines of text, in the second person future tense ("you will…" etc etc), overlaid over a single black and white photo per page. Part Three gets round to telling us what precisely we're reading here, but it seems – seeing as we're reading this in order, and seeing as we're looking at images of derelict miners' properties, barrels of PCB, and so on – to be a story set in a Mexican mining territory. The "you" is horrified at an "It" her husband has brought home from "The Company", which interferes with her domestic arrangements and basically does a Hand That Rocks the Cradle on her, until death happens. This is peppered, as I say, with images of the mine estate as seen now, which have been given weird wire squiggles, either in situ or on to the photo. Oh, and whenever the "It" is mentioned we often get a photo of a fragment of meteorite.

As an experience, then, and chronologically, the first piece is interesting – the static souvenirs of the site with the rocks making for a definite complaint against something alien, the husband not necessarily being a miner but when we puzzle the whole book together it's clear that's what he is. Certainly the names of the characters are too unusual for the whole thing to be an easy browse – you'll find them readily elsewhere. Part Two, with its disjointed jumps, seemingly at random, between authorial voices, and its label-less maps and diagrams from any kind of elevation or top-down plan, turns the whole piece into an environmental complaint, with the PCB dump, and the mining – and potentially the space rock – all at fault. The third part? That practically ignores the extraterrestrial side of things; one further element to turn you against it.

This is an arty thing, and make no mistake – the full-frame photos with their captions disjointed, the white-on-black text following that disjointed in its own different way. It seems, from the academic here, there is a specific kind of writing that this might become a prominent part of, but it doesn't make me especially proud to have been here at the beginning of it. The whole thing shows a potential at every turn – a potential it is permanently a long way from achieving, on this evidence. Two and a half stars.

I don't know what I was expecting from this book, but it was wild and unpredictable. I wouldn't say I enjoyed it, necessarily, and I don't know of many people in my life I would recommend it to in good faith, but I will say that I was engaged throughout. The weirdness of it all dragged me in and carried me along.

I am sorry, but I was not able to make myself finish this book. I will not be leaving a review on GoodReads or anywhere else. I don't believe it would be fair as I did not finish the book.