Alan Krieger, the hero of Estrin's previous novel, Golem Song, is thrown in the tank for some not-atypical disruptive behavior. He meets several challenging cell mates, and when home, bailed out by his mother, composes a tortured diary of his three-hour imprisonment, along with an embedded novella about one of his cellies, The Revenge of Endymion Tush, and includes an explanatory autobiography, The Book of Krieger, by Alan Krieger. The cover painting by Delia Robinson and Vincent Van Gogh is a telling preview. The Notebooks were originally planned to be written in blood on toilet paper squares, but weren’t.