Nabokov's fourteenth novel - the first written after "Lolita" - presents itself as the annotated edition of a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire," composed by John Shade, a thoughtful New England poet and professor who was shot by a murderer before he could write the final, thousandth line. The editor is his colleague, neighbor, and alleged friend Charles Kinbote. However, Kinbote's commentary misses the serious nature of Shade's poem, which deals with the suicide of his troubled and unattractive daughter, death, and the possibility of an afterlife, in a brazenly grotesque manner. Kinbote reveals himself to be the exiled king of Zembla, Charles the Beloved, who was unable to persuade Shade to write his life story and now does so in the form of notes on "Pale Fire.".