The novels were written from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s, and indeed, as was recounted in Arenas's autobiography Before Night Falls, were rewritten many times as manuscripts were lost, destroyed, and/or confiscated by Cuban authorities.
The second volume, Palace of the White Skunks, focuses on adolescent Fortunato who was raised in a house of frustrated aunts, a primal grandmother, and an emasculated grandfather.
The acclaimed editor, Thomas Colchie, has written, that in this work, “Arenas has created a haunting family portrait, combining the lyrical empathy of a Tennessee Williams toward his characters’ troubled lives with a radically fractured narrative that pays dark tribute less to Faulkner than to the schizophrenia of life under any dictatorial extreme.” (Colchie 2001) The Third volume, Farewell to the Sea, is a divided novel, telling the story of a married couple on a six-day vacation on the Cuban coast.
The last half of the novel is composed of six poetic cantos sung in silence to the sea by Hector, a poet who is no longer allowed to write and who has been compelled to enter into a sham marriage to avoid the charge of homosexuality.
In the fourth volume, The Color of Summer, Arenas appears as three characters: Gabriel, the dutiful "straight" son; Reinaldo, the expatriate author; and Skunk in a Funk, the "picaro" – faggot – who seeks merely to live and work as an artist in Castro’s Cuba while engaging in anonymous sex.