Written in a Southern Gothic vein, the novel is inspired in part by the UFO religious cult Heaven's Gate, which he researched extensively while working on the book.
With its use of multiple narrators, dark absurdist comedy, and what Michael Miller, writing for the Village Voice, deemed its "schizophrenic logic" and "gleefully unique syntax," critics compared the novel's style to authors as diverse as William Faulkner, Kathy Acker, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
It was described by one critic as "synesthetic, kinetic poems hypersaturated with mass culture images, delivered in a tone that manages to sound simultaneously surreal and conversational.
[5] Jeppesen's second novel, Wolf at the Door (Twisted Spoon Press), was completed during a residency at the Slovene Writers' Association in Ljubljana, and appeared in 2007.
One concerns an aging artist suffering from a terminal illness who has removed himself to a small cabin to live out his final days, his sole contact being with a deaf-mute gravedigger with whom he is unable to effectively communicate.
The second story centers on the nocturnal wanderings of a former porn star, who may or may not be a serial killer, in an unnamed Eastern European city.
The texts' style range from monologues, dialogues, rants, songs, poems, and epiphanies, among other, more hybrid or inventive forms, all of them evasive of the tropes of traditional art criticism.
[18] Early on in the project, Jeppesen also intended a limited edition vinyl release consisting of sixteen records, but to date this has not happened.
[31] The novel is a parable of twenty-first century colonialism, and features such inventions as a talking dog, dodgy real estate developers, fugitive rap stars, an infinite release opioid manufactured by North Korea, and a lawyer loosely based on Roy Cohn.
In lengthy passages of it, he brings humane insight into bit characters, dispatching the reader into the nebulous consequences of contemporary anomie.
If there is a moral vision that elevates Jeppesen’s farce, it’s in these conversations where characters grapple with the meaning of their pain and perseverance before an inevitable crash and burn into catty obscenity.
Their inabilities to imagine a path out of their respective quagmires lead to schizo neologisms — algorithmic colonialism and necro-phallic accelerationism among them — that propel the plot through dizzying descriptions of Shinjuku sex clubs, harsh noise-rap, and opioid-fueled assault-gun pump frenzy.