For fans of Shirley Jackson and Alice Munro, a Gothic collection of stories featuring carnivorous beavers, art-eaters, and family intrigue. 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 Brooman'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.