The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is a novel by the English writer Angela Carter, published in 1972 and issued in the United States as The War of Dreams. It is a picaresque narrative, written under the influence of surrealism and of Continental theory.

The city in which it takes place is under an attack that no conventional defence can answer. Doctor Hoffman's machines widen time and space so that illusions and living people occupy the same dimension, and the result is a permanent emergency in which crime, madness and every kind of excess flourish together.

Desiderio is an employee of the government that is trying to hold the city together. He has fallen in love with Albertina, the doctor's daughter, who appears to him as a woman made of glass and mostly in dreams, and his way of reaching her is to set out to find her father. He travels through a landscape of cannibals, centaurs and acrobats, and the book is told entirely in his voice, as the account of a man who has to work out what he is willing to accept as real.