In an alternate universe, Reece Myers finds himself in the small Ethiopian village of Gwar, working with an Icelandic medical team and his interpreter Afewerki. The place seems familiar, as he conducts a health survey for his master’s degree. Nurses Svana and Eydis, tasked with weighing local children, are a handful, drinking with the men and raising eyebrows. Their boss, Dr. Thorsonn, tries to keep order, but the village administrator, known as the Snake, challenges his work at every step.

It’s 1986, and the famine machinery is humming in Ethiopia. It’s been two years since the greatest famine of the twentieth century has been uncovered with the deaths of half a million and counting. Clinic nurse Emma Smith, alone and rattled in the remote village of Godo, hears that a new nurse, Reece Myers, is coming and welcomes him with open arms. What begins as a working relationship under trying conditions buds into a likely romance, but Reece is engaged to a woman back home and soon finds himself at the wrong end of an AK-47, dashing Emma’s hopes. 

Tightly knit, these five stories weave an unholy mélange of revenge and ultimate kindness—a Frankenstein tale, vignettes wired together, spanning a thousand years
of language, birth, cruelty, justice, and incest.

After viciously attacking a judge, while giving him a pedicure, Jack escapes the domed city of Pan, Alabama, and begins his quest to free his secret love Lura from the grips of the Infirm, the grotesquely disabled leaders of his world—an over-the-top literary adventure in gothic Southern malaise.