On an increasingly empty highway somewhere in Europe, a lone toll collector continues to ply his trade from his booth. On the 22nd of April, the famous painting The Scream disappears from the Munch Museum in Oslo. With a few spare events, characters, and gestures, Laurent Graff conjures a landscape at once disaffected and resigned, a world on the brink of its own end. A strange and deafening scream sweeps the land, murdering all but a mysteriously unaffected few. The toll collector embarks on a mysterious quest of uncertain end. Will his own death coincides with the world’s, and will it all end, like The Day of the Locust, in a wordless apocalyptic howl?

In stripped-down prose, the author spins a taut tale whose every element verges, as in the best allegories, hauntingly on meaning while remaining tantalizingly enigmatic. Laurent Graff's latest novel is due out in France for the rentrée littéraire .