Before leaving Sciculla, his island of origin, a volcanic and black land, to move to Sguizza, a windy and icy island, journalist Fosco Gargarozzo seduces Fanìa and then abandons her. Little does he know, however, that Fanìa is sacred, and the sacrilege he commits summons a demon to incarnate. Oxymoros, or Tano Lamorte, rises from the volcano’s fluid lava core as a demon in the flesh. In a pinstripe suit, with a poppy sprouting from his buttonhole, by his own mission and admission, he must ravage the lives of Fosco, Ambrosia, his wife, and the women who will descend from them – Robinia, Fosca, and Moth – with the dark evil of absence and separation. The curse, however, transmutes through the generations and makes its journey into a mysterious world, which inextricably links the two islands and the Smoke Factory, an empire that strives for mass mind control through cigarette tobacco.