It was V. that brought me to Thrice, actually, and not the other way around. I distinctly remember having read V. already, and then, not that long after, being in a Wal-Mart in Bedford, PA and seeing Vheissu, their then-most recent album. I was stunned to see such an obvious reference to a novel I had first heard about from my father, who basically only remembered chapter 3, in which a character named Stencil does several “impressions” of not-himself, with each section of the chapter narrated by the person he’s pretending to be at the time. Also there’s like, robot secret agents or something, and everyone’s in Cairo in the late 19th century.

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