To Liminal and Scattercat:
Ok, since I my philosopy can't dance, please enlighten me by posting how your gray matter managed to metaphorically map a zombie who has barfed up experimental CIA pajamas that are covered with the text of a teenager’s secret diary and are worn by the clerk of a 24-hour convenience store who is intent on revolutionizing retail while mentoring a subordinate who is in love with a female who is surrounded by dog ghosts that you can smell but can’t see into the real world.
I don't have anything a priori against story-form Rorschach ink-blot tests. Just for me, personally, the author pushed the envelope a litte too far for my congnitive reference system to be able to lock on and track this mellage. OTOH, the philosophy embedded in my grey matter had no problem dancing along with the Ant King (which, for the sake of this discussion, I will consider to be another ink-blot). And in the interest of full disclosure, I can't really metaphorically map the Ant King into the real world either. But that story did not drive my brain to a total-rejection flipping point as did the Hortlak. So, for me personally, the Ant King's author succeeded in this genre while Link did not. We could do a 2x2 matrix of people who followed/were lost by the Ant King and who followed/were lost by the Horlak and be able to find people who fall into all four cells - although I would bet that the number of people in the "lost by the Ant King, followed the Horlak" would be proportionally much smaller that the numbers in the other cells.