Vermin swarm in the pictures, heightening the expectant mother's fears—nightmare images of vultures, ants crawling over an impaled infant, and rats scattering around a Nazi concentration camp filled with children.

[4] The work inspired Ward to create a wordless novel of his own, Gods' Man (1929),[4] which he followed with Madman's Drum (1930),[5] Wild Pilgrimage (1932),[6] and the short Prelude to a Million Years (1933).

[8] McNeer was pregnant with their second child and the couple were facing the same anxieties as the book's protagonist, and having worked through these issues they carried through the birth of daughter Robin.

[10] The book was to have been Ward's seventh wordless novel, but he abandoned it in 1940 after engraving twenty blocks of it after finding the story too removed from his personal experiences.

[9] The original woodblocks are in the Lynd Ward Collection in the Joseph Mark Lauinger Memorial Library at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.