A vivid lot of characters, each worthy of the utmost compassion or contempt—or perhaps both—inhabit this debut collection. A Bible-beating preacher of the literal kind, a tattoo-covered man who plies dead armadillos with empty beer cans, a mother bent on retaliating against her daughter's attacker, and scores of other obsessive and temperamental personalities wander and collide in this striking collection. Running throughout the book is the recurrent theme of denial, or unshakable naiveté, in the face of disaster and its inevitable consequences. Anchored by the last piece, a cinematic, suspenseful account of a young attorney and her jealous lovers—these tales deliver a hard-hitting assortment of skillful storytelling.

Philip Shirley is president of GodwinGroup ad agency and has received more than a dozen awards for his poetry, fiction, speech, and feature writing. His work has been anthologized in Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe IV and has appeared in online and print journals including Art Gulf Coast, Southern Gothic Online, Southern Humanities Review, and storySouth. He lives in Jackson, Mississippi.