"[2] The young Vergil, "not yet a full-fledged magus," is summoned to Averno, "not yet a lake, but a city built on unstable volcanic fields, with escaping natural gases which are used for industrial processes: metalworking, tanning, textile making.

Publishers Weekly assesses the novel as "less akin to fantasy than to the fiction of Laurence Sterne or William Gaddis ... [a]n acquired taste, ... by turns witty and obscure, frustrating and fascinating."

It notes that "[t]he bare skeleton of [its] plot is fleshed out with an eccentric, wide-ranging series of digressions, reminiscences, dreams and cabalistic glosses, all in a rich, baroque, rhetorical style.

"[3] Evelyn Edson, writing in Vergilius, organ of the Vergilian Society, observes that "Davidson is a science fiction writer," and rhetorically asked "What is he doing in the classical past?

It is plainly the time warp that appeals to him, but he does know his classics, and Vergilians will enjoy his rich weaving of literary references, half-quotations, geographical fact, mythology and history."