[One] feature of Rooke's fiction has been the way the ordinary lives of ordinary people coexist with the most extravagant and bizarre events and are presented in exuberantly experimental forms….

Rooke's form is his content: that the wildness, the exuberance, the grotesqueness, and the sudden tonal shifts from fantasy to the catching and placing of realistic detail in the context of humdrum existence, are all as relevant thematically as they are dazzling technically. One key to such an approach is Rooke's insistence on voice….

Whooping and hollering, cajoling or complaining, Rooke's characters meet the world at an interface of language; their perception is their rhetoric.

One of Rooke's central themes, then, is the way people become trapped in their rhetoric. Perception as speech and speech as perception form a vicious circle of solipsism…. [In] Death Suite, we find Mama Tuddi, the TV faith-healer-cum-Double-Ola-salesperson, caught inside a miasma of...