[1] In 1997, Norton Anthology published an online (albeit truncated) version of the work, along with Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story as part of its print publication Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction.
Designed in Storyspace, the work offers readers a variety of strategies for the navigation of lexia: a cognitive map, links in the text, a default narrative line, and a navigation menu of available paths.
"[3] The cognitive map, shaped like two inverted pyramids with "the end" occupying the middle region, indicates to the reader where they are in the story-world and how much they might still be missing.
About the narrative structure, Douglas has written "I had a vague ... conviction that causality is the root of all narratives: like E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel, I believed that you could rip everything else to shreds as long as you kept something that resembled cause and effect pumping away beneath the surface, you could keep just about any amorphous blob going.
"[4] Hypertext author Stuart Moulthrop called the work "superb...finely balanced between savagery and sympathy.