In this deeply sardonic debut collection of short stories, Jarod Powell masterfully intertwines the bitter traumas and sweet victories of humanity with a hypnotic style, subversive wit, and a powerful, concrete narrative.In this deeply sardonic debut collection of short stories, Jarod Powell masterfully intertwines the bitter traumas and sweet victories of humanity with a hypnotic style, subversive wit, and a powerful, concrete narrative. A hopelessly dysfunctional family holds a formal debate and fights through the cliché, an agoraphobic teenager finds the gumption to enter the world he observes in a single moment of guttural rage, a homeless man harasses a stranger with his visions of the San Fernando Valley as The Garden of Eden, and in the title story, a high school turns into a Biblical village square when a drug overdose turns a nobody into a mythical being.

In gloomy southern Missouri, meth-addicted preacher's son Eric Redmond--idealistic, eccentric, and wise beyond his years--warns us of an impending apocalypse of our own doing. With a wide cast of characters that exist in the periphery of unreliable source Eric, we see both dysfunction and beauty in this hypnotic and fragmented novel of adolescent self-destruction, bad medicine, and death.