McManus ventures from trailers hidden in deep Southern woods to an Arkansas ranch converted into an elephant refuge to a Georgia tent community of sex offenders to a Kentucky band of teenage Satanists. His lost-soul men, women, and children reel precariously between common anxiety and drug-enhanced paranoia, sober reality and fearsome hallucination. These nine stories of twisted humor and pathos re-establish McManus as one of the most bracing voices of our time.
