"This Will Destroy You is a provocatively haunting novel that situates the reader in a complex and intriguing web of interpersonal relations. Among these: 1) Marc Bernard, a plastic surgeon from Paris, France, who doubles as a mercy killer and vigilante. Hes involved in an automobile accident that completely disfigures him, and he grapples with this lack of facial identity and how to restore it for the remainder of the novel, 2) Bernadette Soubirous, a "hysteric" at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, who drowns herself in the Seine River and whose fate is intertwined with Marcs a century later, and 3) Christopher Laurent, a patient who is being psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud with regard to his psychotic tendencies. Juxtaposed against these three principal characters are a series of murders that take place in 1970s Paris and a bizarre case of mass suicide that takes place in 1885, which involves sleepwalkers"--.