Starting from the theoretical premises of the novel as a literary genre that oscillates between the referential (towards historical reality) and the self-referential (towards its own textuality and its own literary tradition), this paper interprets the intertwining of these two aspects in the novel ‘Tolku temno’ / ‘So Dark’ by the Macedonian author Sasho Dimoski. The interpretation follows the thematic levels in the novel (related to the history of epidemics), as well as the narrative procedures in the novel and their metafictional implications in relation to possible narrativizations of the repetitiveness and cyclicality of history.