Hundreds of many different lengths of halls form a confusing and often dangerous, concrete maze inside an institute for criminally insane youth in the early 1960s. Inmate drug fights in the enormous institute keep the medical staff very busy most days of the week, then tensions soar while paranoia sweeps through the inmate population when on many mornings, guards begin finding partly dismembered bodies of inmates in the halls. Toby and Jeremy are close friends and roommates, and both of them have been wrongfully convicted of brutal crimes, then misdiagnosed as criminally insane. The two other main characters in the novel are Billy (The Rabid Butterfly) and Gary, with occasional appearances by God, Time, Night, Magic, and more wonderful entities.