Unlike David Markson's most recent works in experimental writing, Going Down is a more traditional effort, a dark and masterfully plotted narrative of passion and violence set in Mexico in the 1960s. Three Americans, a man and two women, are living together in obvious intimacy. Their habits, strange to the Mexicans, are strangest of all to themselves. When Fern Winters' attention is caught by movement behind a window in a run-down Greenwich Village apartment building, she can't suspect that her encounter with the apartment's occupant will eventually lead her to an abandoned chapel, in a tiny mountain village—clutching the bloody machete with which one of the three has been murdered. Going Down is a rarity among novels—brilliantly and poetically written, faultlessly constructed, centered on fully realized people—completely uninhibited in its depiction of startling eroticism.