The image of post-communist Russia as merely the biggest heap of Eastern Bloc rubble has many sources (not least, recent news of KGB nefariousness) but finds its most fantastical embodiment in the works of Vladimir Sorokin. Ice, now available in English five years after its initial publication, augments deadpan squalor with a transcendence warped by post-millennial paranoia — right from the opening scene, when an apparent kidnapping turns into the awakening ritual of a celestial siblinghood.

The process involves whacking prospects on the chest with a hammerhead fashioned from ice, until they either die or gurgle their “heart name”; white-robed brothers and sisters then relate an otherwordly mythology of numerology, utopianism, and apocalypticism. In Ice’s first section, Sorokin, an exacting architect of idiosyncratic structures, stages three awakenings with slight subject-specific variation, building a backdrop of Muscovite grotesques: acne-scarred nerds, degraded whores, and slick-haired oligarchs; graffiti-coated projects, needle-strewn apartments, and empty warehouses. He then backtracks, tracing the heart-speakers’ origins through Soviet history — amid the purges and politics of Stalinist bureaucracy, they’re just another faction.

In Sorokin’s barely-there prose, narration is entirely exterior, with minimally embellished dialogue and description. Characters are introduced with boldfaced name, age, and brief physical description. His voice is god’s-eye bemused (a teen’s room has “posters on the wall: The Matrix, Lara Croft naked with two pistols, Marilyn Manson as Christ rotting on the cross.”) and occasionally antsy, impatient to get from Point A to Point B but slowed by its own rhythms (“Lapin headed for the entrance. He entered. Went up to the second floor. Walked through the empty smoking room. Walked through the open door of the men’s toilet.”). But mostly Sorokin’s grip is unwavering, even a little perverse. Rather than carry the arc forward, Ice’s final chapters form a lateral movement toward a tease ending, timed with the relish of one who controls his audience’s imagination and isn’t afraid to abuse it. For a comparable theatrical muscle-flex, you’d have to murder a rival by plutonium poisoning.