EXCERPT The sun, like a golden knife, was steadily paring away the edge of the shade beside the walls… The sun, sucking with a thousand mouths, was drawing the sweat of my body. —Sadeq Hedayat We encounter our first heliomaniac before a creature of almost tentacular orifices/fangs (vampiric sun), a resilience-sapping organism that gradually laps and tears at the narrator’s energy, referred to both as a ‘golden knife’ and as a ‘thousand mouths’. Nevertheless, what intrigues here is the fact that this depletion occurs through two different mechanisms: (1) the shaving away of the human shadow along the wall (why does it strike indirectly, assaulting from the edges, targeting the phantasmic projection over the authentic being?); (2) the continual tapping of sweat from the body (what victory does it claim in drawing the inside outward, causing slickened interiority to spill over the solid border between self and world?) …