Alan Heathcock

A blistering collection of stories from an exhilarating new voice One man kills another after neither will move his pickup truck from the road. A female sheriff in a flooded town attempts to cover up a murder. When a farmer harvesting a field accidentally runs over his son, his grief sets him off walking, mile after mile. A band of teens bent on destruction runs amok in a deserted town at night. As these men and women lash out at the inscrutable churn of the world around them, they find a grim measure of peace in their solitude. Throughout Volt, Alan Heathcock's stark realism is leavened by a lyric energy that matches the brutality of the surface. And as you move through the wind-lashed landscape of these stories, faint signs of hope appear underfoot. In Volt, the work of a writer who's hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock's tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation.

Stories

Volt

From the award-winning author Alan Heathcock comes an American myth of the future: a vision of civil war, spectacle, and disaster of biblical proportions. In a future America ravaged by natural disaster, pandemic, and political unrest, a fundamentalist religious faction emerges. As the Chosen gain power, enticing civilians with bread and circuses, a civil war breaks out between its members and the US government. But Mazzy Goodwin, a young soldier, only wants to find her little sister, Ava Lynn. One day, she wakes in a bomb crater to find wings sprouting from her back. Has she died? Been gifted wings by God? Undergone a military experiment? The world sees a miracle. But Mazzy is coaxed into seeing it as an opportunity: to become the angel-like figurehead of the revolution, in return for being reunited with her sister. Her journey leads her to New Los Angeles, where the Chosen have set up the headquarters for their propaganda machine—right in the ruins of Hollywood. Aided by friends old and new, she must navigate a web of deceit while staying true to herself. Told in sharp, haunting prose, as cinematic as it is precise, Alan Heathcock’s 40 is a dizzyingly fantastical novel about the dangers of blind faith, the temptation of spectacle, and the love of family. In a tale by turns mythic and tragic, one heroine must come to terms with the consequences of her decisions—and face the challenges of building a new world.

Alan Heathcock

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