The onslaught of ideas and perennially changing spaces and moods push against the boundaries of traditional storytelling and only work because desire, survival, and transmutation are strong cohesive elements that hold the narrative together. Albina contains a woman, a goddess, and a monster, and that multiplicity helps the narrative jump around wildly while still retaining an untouched core and a bit of mystery. The quest to find a sacred cactus to cure Albina of her ailment and the subsequent discovery of her true nature take the novel from weird territory into that of the surreal, but the struggle of the woman’s Self and the unwelcome Otherness that invades and mutates her are the driving motors behind the action: