In telling about the remarkable group of people characterized by the title—buzzing nonentities, boring idiots, stinging parasites—Faulkner succeeds in endowing each with the charm of a humming bird, for the highly amused reader if not for the other “mosquitoes” aboard. The yacht on which these strangely assorted companions are gathered belongs to a New Orleans matron, a social climber and literary lion huntress who collects a famous writer, a sculptor, a naive Englishman, a sex-innocent idiot, a most advanced young lady and her mechanically inclined brother, and various other assorted insects. They almost all come against their better judgments: they all more or less live to regret it.