The novel was selected as one of 100 books to read from Eastern Europe and Central Asia by Calvert Journal.

[1] The novel is first person narrative of a twelve year old Egon who tries to become a normal teenager with normal teenage problems of growing up in a milieu of little industrial town in then Tito's Yugoslavia with open borders to the West that allowed free visits to the other side of the iron curtain that was not so iron at the borders between modern day Slovenia and Italy, in times of record players and popular and less popular alternative music records.

At home he is exposed to his grandmothers PTSD, which she got from World War One because of which she keeps having hallucinations of dead souls and she makes sure that Egon keeps watching dreadful illustrations of martyrs from her little book of Catholic saints and apologize to dead souls for stepping on them accidentally, which only she can see.

As well at home he is exposed to neglect and scapegoating by his single mother, who is in conflict with his nona.

Because the double life they are forced to live daily, they would need help from an adult who they could trust and who would understand them in order to integrate it, they have no other choice but to escape into new identity, which in contrast to their real child's self, who is helpless, becomes a king over the dark kingdom of nona, mother and school, as the king of (their) rattling ghosts.