"The 13 Lives of Captain Bluebear" follow the adventures of the character Bluebear in the first half of his 27 lives (the joke being that a bluebear lives three times as long as a cat).The novel intersperses Bluebear's narrative with excerpts from "The Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs" by Professor Abdullah Nightingale, who bacterially transmits it into Bluebear's brain.