Through interviews with survivors intercut with the hallucinatory account of one man's descent into a protective insanity, The Curtain and the Earth tells the story of the Stath-Khellian Fissure, a fictional genocide in a faraway land. Warner Schonborn, an American engineer, is swept into its maelstrom and becomes witness to the annihilation of an entire country and its people. Lost in this unthinkable disaster, he falls into a fugue state in which he dreams of encountering the hand of God himself, a God forced out of a billion-year silence during the genocide's last days to physically erase earth's barbaric past. Before experiencing this final cataclysm, Warner first survives a series of brutal ordeals both mitigated and intensified by the friendship of an endangered young boy and a mysterious living saint.