The book can be read as the first volume of a postmodern epic. Oblique references to tragedies of recent human history are apparent, although, ample Biblical and mythical motives suggest a far broader project. In contradistinction to 'factual report' works such as If This Is a Man by Primo Levi, the work adopts a mode of oneiric realism whereby horror is forced beneath the surface of consciousness only to emerge again in new and increasingly nightmarish forms. Z213: Exit is difficult to classify by genre, and is simultaneously a novella, a poem, and a journal.

Most critics place Z213: Exit in a postmodern context exploring correlations with such writers as Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy while others underline its modernist affinities and the work's firm foundation on classical and religious texts. The voyage is also akin to the experience of a religious quest with a variety of biblical references, mostly from the Old Testament, being embedded into the text which is often fractured and foregoing punctuation. The work develops as a sequence of fragmented diary entries recording the solitary experiences of an unnamed, Ulysses-like persona in the course of a train voyage gradually transformed into an inner exploration of the boundaries between self and reality. Despite being the first of the trilogy in narrative order, the book was the third to be published in the series. It is the first installment of the Poena Damni trilogy. Although evidently postmodern, this is a book that does not undermine or shrink the traditional Grand Narrative themes on the contrary, it thrives on them.Z213: Exit is a 2009 novel by Greek author Dimitris Lyacos.

Horror is created by the scantiest vocabulary craftily combined to form a broken, unstructured syntax, seemingly tight, but leaving enough loopholes through which the reader's subconscious fears can pop in and out. Written in a unique prose style, at times bordering on poetry and conveying a 'pilgrimage of the soul' through a series of increasingly haunting pieces, Z213: EXIT creates the feeling that reader and narrator are led together through an eschatological experience. As if waking up in a nightmare an escapee recounts his fleeting experiences in a series of fragmented diary entries in a hide-and-seek game with Death or even God. Z213: EXIT is the first installment of the Poena Damni trilogy: a camp, a train, soldiers, a Bible with notes inside, encroaching darkness, the struggle to remember, the struggle of hiding, physical pain.

Z213 exit