Spooked by some ball lightning on his wedding night, repressed young Catholic Griffith Smolders interprets this as a sign and abandons his conjugal responsibilities by escaping through the window, enduring a series of misadventures along the way involving, among others, con men, murderesses, shipwrecks, and autodidact biologist hermits. Giving chase, his betrothed, Avice Drinkwater, finally runs Grif aground in a tiny island community, and prepares to exact her revenge.

Set in the rough-and-tumble late nineteenth century backwoods, The Iconoclast's Journal is wildly kinetic, a madcap picaresque and comic anti-romance by one of the most inventive writers at work today.