The pages were illustrated using traditional lithographic printmaking techniques, making use of coloured-pencil style figures and saturated shades over expanses of white spaces.

[1][2][3] Catching sight of the sea, the insatiable Fausto sets out on a boat in an attempt to assert ownership of it, only to find that excessive greed leads to one's own downfall.

[4] Meanwhile, The Fate of Fausto was inspired by German legend of Faust, where the protagonist makes a bargain with the devil, trading his soul in exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.

[8] Jeffers spoke about how the book was conceived in an interview with The Irish Times: I was on the north coast of Antrim and pulled over and to watch a storm coming in, and some absent thoughts started to drift off in different directions.

[5] Created with a restricted palette,[5] the pages are illustrated with saturated shades of neon pink, acid yellow, and Prussian blue over expanses of white spaces.

[3][7][9] Leonard S. Marcus of The New York Times interpreted the predominance of blank spaces as "a strategy that symbolically isolates Fausto within his world and makes visible the emptiness of his relationship to it".

[7][10] Imogen Carter of The Guardian described the book as "a fantastically fresh departure" and commented that "it's a tale full of suggestion with expanses of white page wittily used as pregnant pauses and punctuation."

A review in Publishers Weekly of The Fate of Fausto described it as "boldly conceived and gracefully executed" and that "Jeffers's dark fable imagines what happens when desire leads to selfishness and self-destruction, and shows the merits of calm refusal in the face of dangerous individuals.

"[1] Kirkus Reviews called the book "a cautionary fable on the banality of belligerence" that suggests that "tantrums bring but temporary, superficial rewards".