While in Los Angeles being tested Samson meets Donald, a man who is working with Ray and his team so that they can extract one of his memories.

When the procedure succeeds he is left with violent images of nuclear weapons testing which upset him and cause him to leave the clinic and search for Donald.

Joy Press, writing in The Village Voice, said: "Krauss is a fluent, thoughtful writer who takes on a lot of complex ideas and rarely loses her grip on them... Man Walks into a Room is a chilling addition to the annals of amnesia lit.

[1][2] Gillian Flynn, in a review for Entertainment Weekly, described Krauss's prose as "casually dazzling, as are the ideas she explores through Samson".

[3] Clay Smith, in a review for The Austin Chronicle, said: "This is a novel of ideas, with a plot that occasionally reads like a 'plot of emptiness,' as Samson once considers describing his own mind to a taxi driver.