Born in wartime Berlin and raised amid the wreckage of history, Elias Deane Grimm Lohr has inherited a family legacy stranger than fiction—and considerably less respectable.

His grandfather, a pioneering physician, turns an obsession with human digestive gas into an unlikely contribution to twentieth-century warfare. His brilliant, rebellious father rises within Nazi Germany before vanishing with the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Grimm’s own path carries him from the South Pacific to small-town Illinois, Northwestern University, and the delirious fringes of Hollywood, where actors, eccentrics, predators, and visionaries compete to outdo reality itself.

But Grimm’s search for fame, love, and belonging uncovers secrets capable of rewriting everything he believes about his family. When an invention inspired by his grandfather attracts the attention of one of the world’s richest men, Grimm is drawn into a dangerous struggle that leads to the mysterious Indian Ocean archipelago of Morro Burra.

Spanning three generations, Revelations of Grimm Lohr is an audacious fictional memoir: part historical epic, part absurdist adventure, and part darkly comic reckoning with power, progress, suffering, and the magnificent folly of humankind.