Rats and human beings aren't always that far apart from each other. As the political intrigue of phantasmagorical postcommunist reality develops into nightmare, the greed, cunning, and malice of the humans more and more resemble the behavior of the large communities of destructive rodents, while the rats acquire more and more human features. Svetloyar is bidding to be included in the list of historical towns making up Russia's famous Golden Ring a lucrative tourist route around Moscow. Aside from the problem that it has no history, having been entirely constructed during the Stalinist period, the place is overrun by rats and two pest-controllers are summoned from Moscow. What follows is an astute interrogation of the nature of both humanity and history, as the narrator's desire for the regional dictator's wife sits subtly alongside his perpetual concern for the destruction of rats. While clearly in the classical Russian tradition, the novel also incorporates the more experimental and satirical aesthetic of Soviet writers such as Bulgakov, and as the narrator's perception of reality becomes increasingly warped, so does our experience of the almost comically grotesque landscape around him.