Within the pages of American scribe Don DeLillo’s latest novel, just about everything is deadly serious. The subject matter, its general theme, is death. Its main protagonist wanders through a series of stark, sanitised halls for much of the book’s first two thirds, and you can all but hear the synthesised Vangelis music playing in the background. Like Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in Bergman’s film, there’s a game afoot, but there’s nothing fun about this game in particular.

Zero K is a novel which from the title-down is literally about coldness. In every sense of the term.

Two of the main characters – and there are all of four, perhaps five in total – are looking to cheat death, rather than avoiding it, but by beating it to the punch: the plan is that they will be cryogenically frozen, Walt Disney-style, in some underground cryonics compound in central Asia, with the hope of future resurrection. Ideally, they will one day be brought back to ‘life’ with yet-to-be-conceived technology, refreshed, renewed, perfected and infused with pre-selected memories, as well as “Russian novels, the films of Bergman, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky” (because they’re rich and futuristic and aiming for some kind of higher cultural value; nothing mainstream for these sensibilities, no sir).

So the billionaire mogul, Ross, is planning on joining his trophy wife Artis in the frozen nether, while his son, Jeffrey, spends much of the novel’s 300-odd pages … ‘dealing’ with it. On a conceptual level, while the world outside his protective bubble collapses around him.

The elusive and abstract tone renders Zero K close to impossible to absorb and even harder to like. You’re kept at a distance by DeLillo’s prose, who’s narrative unfolds on the page in the manner of a stream of consciousness metaphysical philosophy lesson – a world is painted in stark, resigned and muted tones; the characters seeking to find their way into the next realm are by the nature of their absent personalities doing the rest of the world a favour; they might as well already be dead.

It’s hard to encapsulate, in the same way as it was seriously hard to plough through. DeLillo has constructed a world, and in as much a novel that is a thematic twin of the final act of Cameron Crowe’s odd, but oddly compelling Tom Cruise romance-thriller-sci-fi tale Vanilla Sky, except without the clumsy expository dialogue. While I’m pretty sure he’s not building this futuristic world just to mock it, it has the feeling of a story being set inside a mausoleum; a dreamlike state where you cannot for the life of you feel any emotional connection to any of the characters.

Zero K can claim as its contribution to the world that death could be little more than the next step on an ongoing journey, or something that can be avoided with enough funds at your disposal and a complete absence of human emotion.

So, yeah. Good times. Pass the popcorn; hopefully it’s been laced with ant-depressants.