Winner of the 2022 ReLit AwardsFinalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award

A Gothic collection of stories featuring carnivorous beavers, art-eaters, and family intrigue, for fans of Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson

The small southern Ontario town known as The Pump lies at the crossroads of this world's violence--a tainted water supply, an apathetic municipal government, the Gothic decay of rural domesticity--and another's.

In Hegele's interconnected stories, no one is immune to The Pump's sacrificial games. Lighthouse dwellers, Boy Scouts, queer church camp leaders, love-sick and sick-sick writers, nine-year-old hunters, art-eaters--each must navigate the swamp of their own morality while living on land that is always slowly (and sometimes very quickly) killing them.

"An inescapable, ferocious dream of a book. Good luck getting out."--John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments

"[The] writing is beautiful... Nightmarish and yet somehow fantastical."--This Magazine