Heart of Darkness

But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.

Charles Marlow, at the behest of his employer, an ivory trading company, travels to the heart of Africa with a simple order: seek out an important trading post headed by a man named Kurtz.  On his steamboat down the Congo River, Marlow begins to discover a developing lore surrounding Kurtz, who has reached a near mystical and divine status among the natives, yet feared and intimidating all the same.

A seminal novel that had a wide range of influence in the century to follow, Heart of Darkness explores the disturbing idea that the sanity residing in the human psyche is frightfully close to the edge of madness.