Exiled from a flying pyramid above fascist Paris, the Egyptian god Horus strikes a deal with Alcide Nikopol, a cryogenically preserved political prisoner, possessing his body to pursue power in the human world. The god's divine will and the man's dormant identity share one flesh, and neither fully controls the outcome.
The regime is shown through crumbling architecture, kitsch propaganda, and rulers obsessed with ritual and spectacle rather than governance, so authority appears less as functioning control than as an aesthetic performance masking rot. Seen this way, the state's menace and its absurdity are the same thing.
The protagonist, revived after decades frozen, moves through a world that has erased his context while a god overwrites his intentions, so his sense of self is portrayed as continuously eroded by forces outside his memory. The book treats stable identity as something that dislocation in time and external possession can dissolve.