Indeed, he uses his reportorial talent for description to conjure the glum, shopworn world they inhabit: he notices the linoleum curling at its seams, the fake antique furniture “broken out in pediments and lathework grenades and ornamental buboes,” the old sewing machine “whose plastic had gone yellow.”

In the late 1950s Howard Fabing, a medical doctor, obtained permission to inject bufotenine intravenously into a number of inmates at the Ohio State Penitentiary.

as rare as a hen's tooth

a fitter of clothing, or of machinery