Lobotomist

After two short story and two poetry collections, the young Prague author comes with a brand new prose on the border between a modern fairy tale with psychedelic elements and a dystopian novel. The narrator of the story, who calls himself Lobotomik, a boy with a deep scar on his head from brain surgery, lives in a strange facility called Nemříž.

He has two close friends among the even stranger staff of the institute: a girl named Darja with a tear duct disorder and a red spider with dark sunglasses named Reginald. One day, the ingenious spider Reg orchestrates the escape of all three friends from the asylum, and a short but adventurous and fantastical journey to freedom and the discovery of what is and what is not real begins.

Pavel Bušta's playful descriptions of alternate realities are somewhere between Lewis Carroll and Tolkien, while his imagination and humour, as if under the influence of LSD, do not deny the influence of Irvin Welsh.