Set in London, Paris, and Munich in the 1940s and 1950s, Exquisite Corpse is, like Irwin's cult classic, The Arabian Nightmare, a novel about the strange and ever-morphing powers of the imagination--at once a love story, a mystery, and an investigation into the ideas of absurdist art. Caspar, the narrator of Exquisite Corpse, is one of an odd group of friends known as the Serapion Botherhood-a group of artists, painters, and writers who are experimenting, expanding, and developing the then-nascent concept of surrealism. While the real-life figures André Breton, Salvador Dali, and Henry Moore--among others--move in and out of the narrative, Caspar details his and his friends' investigations into sex, surrealism, hypnagogic imagery, waxworks, mesmerism, and madness.