Burn Burn the Dead Tree follows Vadim, a journalist and alcoholic on the verge of a personal crisis, who flees Moscow for Crimea in late winter 2014. He hopes to pull himself together and lick his wounds, but instead he encounters an unexpected love and finds himself caught up in a criminal underworld of murder, betrayal, and pursuit. The bleakness and endless rain, the broken lives of ordinary people, the annexation of Crimea, and Ukraine frozen in a state of shock, form the backdrop to what initially appears to be a crime story. And yet this is neither a thriller nor a crime road story. It is a modern myth about a tragic moment in the nation’s history, when a small, often sinful man is given one more chance to confront transcendental evil.

Set in counterpoint to the main narrative is the semi-mythical story of Koychu, an old Crimean Karaite. We learn how Koychu, a powerful figure in the world of illegal money-laundering operations, came to possess his unique gift of foresight. Now Koychu knows that his end is near. He also sees transcendental evil invading their world. The old Karaite must find a lost soul to perform a ritual that may offer a chance to break the cycle of eternal evil.

Vadim finds himself in an incongruous vehicle for this landscape – a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro – in the unexpected company of hitman Andrei, Koychu’s old partner in crime and friend, and Andrei’s heavily wounded accomplice. The two have just robbed a gang of criminal cash couriers in Sevastopol. They are being pursued by another hitman, Igor – not only to recover the money, but to settle his own score with Andrei. At times, it seems that Igor and Andrei are one and the same person: absolute evil divided into two, attempting to devour itself.

What’s more, there are killers sent after Nina, the woman Vadim falls in love with. Nina’s ex – once a powerful criminal underworld mogul, now building a legitimate career in the States – will stop at nothing to destroy the compromising evidence in Nina’s possession and eliminate Nina herself, a dangerously incriminating witness.

Russian paramilitary mercenaries who have flooded into Crimea intervene in the gangland clashes, while Chechen gangsters pursue their own financial interests. On his journey, Vadim witnesses a wild whirl of violence and total absence of empathy, like the circles of Hell that must be passed through on the way to… But who knows on the way to what?

Vadim and Andrei eventually reach a large Ukrainian industrial city. To Andrei it is the destination where Vadim shall fulfil Koychu's prophecy. Vadim experiences these days and events as a bad trip, lived in a perpetual state of drunkenness and hangover.

Nina also finds herself in the same city, fleeing from her pursuers. She finds Vadim and tries to pull him out of the grip of the story he has stumbled into. But another evil has already crawled into the city: the hitman Igor, accompanied by a new mysterious companion – a girl who, apparently, cannot be killed.

Nina gets to know about a secret cave in one of the abandoned quarries. At the bottom of the quarry lies a dead lake. It is in this cave that Vadim, trying to recover from a devastating bender, and Nina hide from the world. During his withdrawal, Vadim draws portraits of everyone he has met along the way. Back in Moscow, the Chechen Sagid once told Vadim about his encounter with Eshap, an evil spirit from the Nart legends. The immortal demon cannot be killed by a mortal unless he performs an impossible task. According to Eshap, whoever buries at the bottom of the gorge the heads of all the heroes, whom she has defeated and now keeps as trophies in her macabre collection, will save their souls and defeat evil. Now Vadim undertakes a similar task. One by one, he lowers bottles containing portraits of the people he has met on his journey into the quarry, sinking them to the bottom of the dead lake.

Two old foes, Igor and Andrei, finally meet in the grounds of an old Soviet-era market, dominated by an ornate Stalinist-style building. What unfolds around it is a grotesque echo of the duel between Achilles and Hector. But evil cannot kill itself. Igor, who has suffered throughout the novel from a relentless, debilitating headache, dies of a stroke. Andrei loses the objects of his cult – the Chevrolet – along with the money, and is seriously wounded. But what matters most to him is knowing that Vadim has completed the ritual.

Posternak creates a unique literary text in which terse everyday dialogue reminisent of Carver and Hryhir Tiutiunnyk coexists with dense, richly imagistic descriptive prose. The novel refuses to moralize, shifting seamlessly between dirty realism and sudden flashes of poetic insight, in the spirit of Denis Johnson.

In his novel, Posternak engages in a rich and often unexpected literary and cultural dialogue. Echoes of Vasyl Stefanyk and Conrad's Heart of Darkness can be felt alongside motifs from the Iliad and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; references to the late lyrics of King Crimson appear alongside Crimean myths and the Nart sagas; Hemingway's The Killers meets Edward Albee's Zoo Story.

Burn Burn the Dead Tree is a novel about memory, guilt, and repetition. About the way evil can endlessly divide, argue with itself, and change its face while remaining the same. About people trying to break out of an endless loop of violence. And about hope – a hope that arises not through victory, but in defiance of a world that continues relentlessly rolling toward the abyss.