In this debut crime-horror story collection, David Simmons drags you into a phantasmagoric Baltimore where the dead refuse to stay dead and the living claw for meaning. Hallucinatory and darkly comic love stories are set against the gritty backdrop of the city, where guns and drugs collide with tales of paranoia, pursuit, and revenge. Here, a middle school biology class spirals into a surreal vivisection. A man returns home each night to chew the freshly grown fingers off a corpse to avoid going into withdrawal. A monster in an upstairs apartment kills people, records songs about it, and retweets his victims postmortem. In these stories, love arrives wearing the mask of addiction and absurdity. If Brian Evenson and Ottessa Moshfegh wrote for The Wire you'd get the unique style of David Simmons. Fans of body horror, transgressive fiction, and literary surrealism will find themselves unable to look away as Simmons explores the intersections of violence and dark humor with a razor-sharp voice.
