The Second Story Man is a half-real, half-imagined account by the narrator, a seventeen year old girl named Anna, of the love affair between her friend and roommate Mary and a man named Florian Rando, the "second story man."
Set in the bars and hang-outs of New York's East Village in the late 1950s, just before the rise of the pop-drug culture, it's the story of a man who feeds off the lives of others, and of the women who participate in their descruction in order to sustain him.