I got this book a while ago and don’t remember why I got it in the first place. I’d say this book is about half fiction and half philosophical musings. There are long lecture-type sections about a variety of topics including alchemy, intoxicants, and the limitations of science. He claims all food is really sunshine and only seems like it’s other things because matter is the carrier of sunshine. He claims liquid can sometimes go against the force of gravity. I kept wishing he’d just get on with the story rather than lecturing us so often and at such great length.

There was a scary moment at the beginning in which a man alone at home feels the presence of another. In order to convince himself, he says he’ll wager his soul that he’s alone. Then, another man suddenly appears in the room to claim his soul. It was pretty scary, but this is the only frightful moment in the book.

The main character is known only as The-Man-Who-Did-It. He has a wife and two kids and reveals the secrets the Freemasons even though he knows it will cost him his life. In 1826, he gets repeatedly jailed and kidnapped. He challenges the man to whom he’s telling his story to guess who he is, even though it’s pretty obvious he’s meant to be William Morgan.

After faking his death, the Freemasons cause him to artificially age so no one will recognize him. He’s taken to the Kentucky caverns where he meets an underground creature without eyes or even eye sockets to serve as his guide to the hollow earth.

He goes deeper until he reaches a point ten miles underground where it suddenly gets bright again. Apparently darkness revivifies as it passes through the earth and turns back into light at a certain point. The creature without eyes reveals that he can see just fine because he’s able to sense the energy of darkness. The creature predicts the earth will freeze and mankind will have to go underground in the future.

They continue through a forest of colossal fungi. Gravity lessens as they descend. Down here, when you shout, your voice comes at you from further away. You need to whisper to keep your voice close to you. The-Man-Who-Did-It gains more energy and seems to grow younger as they descend.

Chapter 29 contains a trigger warning inviting readers to skip this chapter which discusses a biologist who became so obsessed with learning anatomy that he becomes a murderer. So, the moral of the chapter is science is bad. Science is also bad because it makes people lose faith in immortality and it explains away why a mother loves her child.

Apparently, the only reason we need to breathe is gravity presses on us. There’s no gravity in the center of the earth, so you don’t need to breathe there and this makes you live longer.

The-Man-Who-Did-It notices an upside-down toadstool. The gills within were a deep green color and curved out from the center in a spiral. It was covered with green fruit. Each spore being two to three inches in diameter and honeycombed on the surface, covered with a hard, transparent shell and nearly full of clear, green liquid.

Drinking this liquid causes The-Man-Who-Did-It to hallucinate. He passes through the Drunkard’s Den. These men couldn’t resist drinking and become deformed, some with a huge head, huge hand, or other huge body part absorbing the rest of their body and making their bodies small. They can’t move and only want to drink, but can’t. According to the guide, drunkards are monsters. On the surface, their mind becomes abnormal, but down here, their bodies do.

The-Man-Who-Did-It is told not to drink the fermented drink made from the fungus, but is repeatedly threatened and tempted to do so. A bunch of beautiful women appear singing and playing music, including Etidorhpa, the embodiment of love. However, this isn’t necessarily a good thing, because one may love either good or evil.

Then he’s suddenly in a desert and swells up from the heat. This time he’s tempted to drink due to being parched. Then he freezes solid for the age of the universe and yearns for death rather than exist forever in a changeless state. We learn that dead men remain conscious after death, shackled to an unmoving body, but conscious of all that happens around them until they disintegrate. Yikes.

There may not actually be an afterlife, but in the split second when we die, we’ll experience either an eternity of heaven or hell based on how we lived our lives, so we should live our lives as if heaven and hell are real.

The-Man-Who-Did-It reveals to the man he’s telling his story to that he left out a lot of his underground adventures including caverns filled with reptiles, caverns filled with flying creatures neither beast nor bird, a passage of ooze, and labyrinths. He occasionally heard melodies like a chorus of angels such that sight and sound blended together into a single wonderful sense.

As they continue their descent, he notices there isn’t any water at a certain point because they’ve reached the depth at which water goes up. At six thousand miles underground, they reach a void with nothing to see but light for miles in every direction. The void reflects the surface of earth somehow and he sees a ships sailing miles above them.

They jump into the void. Here, there is no gravity. Mind has power over matter, so you can fall down or go up based on your will. There’s no atmosphere, but they can now read each other’s minds, a power The-Man-Who-Did-It retains.

The story ends on a cliff hanger. The-Man-Who-Did-It reaches the land of Etidorhpa also known as The End of Earth, The Unknown Country, or the Inner Circle, but he won’t tell what happened next.

In an afterword, we’re told there are secret messages in the book for those who read between the lines. Hopefully, these secret messages are more clever than spelling Aphrodite backwards.