In The Dead, the follow-up to his acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year), Christian Kracht mines the feverish film culture of the 1930s to produce a Gothic tale of global conspiracy, personal loss, and historical entanglements large and small. In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil N geli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that N geli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective-to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come. Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister Masahiko Amakasu intends to counter Hollywood's growing influence and usher in a new golden age of Japanese cinema by exploiting his Swiss visitor. The arrival of N geli's film-star fiancee and a strangely thuggish, pistol-packing Charlie Chaplin-as well as the first stirrings of the winds of war-soon complicates both Amakasu's and N geli's plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom.