With Chris Eaton's latest work, the 'cover version' is no longer the exclusive property of the music world! In A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), one of Thomas Hardy's earliest works (and the first to be published under his own name), a man is hired to restore an old church tower and falls in love with a woman whose father will not allow it. She then becomes involved in a love triangle with the man's friend that eventually results in her death. But in Eaton's version, the man is a novelist named Neil, an architect of words. The resulting book he compiles leads him to believe he has discovered the secrets of creation and transforms him into a monster. Meanwhile, the woman's father -- a personified version of the tragedy that hangs over all Hardy novels -- develops a taste for destruction and decides to stick it to everyone. Soon, as copies of the book start turning up everywhere from the Australian outback to the wreck of the Titanic, the man's genius is suddenly called into question. It is then that Burke, a friend of Neil, decides to investigate all the events, forming charts that depict the connections between them in the hopes of somehow finding an explanation for his own confused life. But when the detective is also a poet, more concerned with metaphorical implications than any sort of quantitative reality, does his version of the events trap them in Hardy's over-dramatic consequences forever? Using plot developments, themes, and even complete passages lifted directly from A Pair of Blue Eyes and other relevant texts, The Grammar Architect explores what it means to create -- and sometimes even to steal -- all seasoned with Eaton's characteristic absurdist philosophy and tangential histories on subjects like Logan's Run, Dr Pepper, circus freaks, the Olympics, the opera, and the exciting race to discover the secrets of time travel.