The story is set in a near-future America of terrible orderliness. Eugenic suicide chambers, legal and civic. A restored monarchy. Polite society. Everything in its correct place.

Only the narrator cannot agree with the version of events everyone else accepts. He believes he is the rightful heir to something vast. He may have read the play. He may be insane.

Chambers does not tell you which.

What he does instead is something more uncomfortable: he builds a world in which the normal and the deranged are indistinguishable from the inside. The narrator doesn’t experience his reality as distortion. He experiences it as clarity. The people around him are the ones who cannot see.

I’ve met this narrator. I suspect everyone has. The question the story quietly refuses to answer is whether the narrator is right about them.

That refusal is the whole achievement. The rest is furniture.

— G. H. Schreiber

25/01/2026