" .this creature was growing at an alarming rate. But it was not healthy. Crippled by clumsy amputation and drunken surgery, its wounds were left gaping, and I became both scared and excited in equal measure by what grew before me."What begins as a bit of harmless soul-searching soon disintegrates into an unruly celebration of paradox and confusion, before descending into a fearless joy ride through our customary ideas of pride, identity and truth, a cynical conspiracy now charged with making fools of the best of us. None of which, of course, would ever explain the arrival of Richard and his gang, a paranoid rabble of misfits snarled up in a chaotic chronology of violence, revenge and all-day drinking, hurtling towards an explosive finale they would all wish to claim as their own. Yet at its heart, Messages from the Dead remains an optimistic call to adventure and an honest attempt to offer meaning to a meaningless world.