The Third Policeman

An unnamed narrator, obsessed with the writings of an eccentric philosopher named de Selby, partners with a shifty man named Divney to rob and murder a wealthy neighbor. When the narrator goes to collect the hidden money, he steps into a countryside that no longer obeys the rules he knows. He arrives at a police barracks where the officers are consumed by their Atomic Theory, convinced that people who ride bicycles slowly exchange atoms with them until they become part machine. Time stretches, eternity hides in a lift down a corridor, and de Selby's absurd footnotes keep intruding on the page. Slowly the reader understands that the narrator has been dead the whole time, trapped in a looping afterlife of his own making.