Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world, akin to Kafka's The Castle. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell.

As Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence. They disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit, leaving a narrative that is both unsettling and utterly captivating.