Almost from the outset of her arrival in the town, soft-muted music, the strange, heart-rending, mournful music of the East - suggestive of apes, and pearls, and bhang, and the colour blue - was to be heard, surging from the Nook in monotonous improvisation.

Things would soon become bigger than the local nighteries.

the puke saber … pulses light over rapidly changing wavelengths, apparently inducing disorientation, nausea and even vomiting

So come on, doc, precisely which kind of sicko is America? You might plump for depressed (isolationist), psychopathic (lack of empathy) or even psychotic (barking mad - what P.G. Wodehouse referred to as thinking you're a poached egg).