At 17, Anthony Baxter becomes an orphan after losing both his mother, Helena, and his father, Edward, to AIDS in 2005 and 2010, respectively. Due to his family’s secretive ways, Anthony only learned the diagnosis at 11, when a friend showed him the film Philadelphia. On the day of his father’s funeral, Anthony seeks out the diary his father left him to read after his death. Back in the present, Anthony finds that Edward had oiled the creaky ladder to the attic and put out fresh candles for Anthony to read by. The journal is a letter from Edward to his future unborn child and begins with his all-consuming love for Helena, including references to sex that raise the question of how Anthony feels about what he’s reading. The novel scarcely breaks from the journal as Edward plows through the story of the 14 days of madness that overtook him after first learning he might be HIV-positive, having also infected his wife, resulting in feverish rants about his feelings and increasingly unhinged actions, including attacks on co-workers, friends, and his wife. Frenetic metaphors like “My heartbeat equaled a Tommy Gun firing with an endless magazine” reinforce the highly emotional tone, even if they don’t always elicit empathy. Edward’s self-destructive journey takes him to a derelict part of downtown, where he seems as likely to drink himself to death as he is to take his desired vengeance out on womankind and society. Lines like “By giving a hooker the disease, I’m infecting a fruit tree that all men…pick from time to time” reveal the devastation of his mental state. The world is not all that Edward believes it to be, though, and people like Natasha, a trafficked Russian woman, offer succor, if only he could see it. When we do encounter Anthony again during too-rare intermissions, he’s “deeply disturbed” by what he’s read, but this is Edward’s story until the end, when the truth about life after the diary is revealed to Anthony.