Philip Themio Stoddard

It’s 1882 and the Gilded Age is in full swing when Marian Brook, a young orphaned daughter of a Southern general, moves in with her rigidly conventional aunts in New York City. With the help of Peggy Scott, an African-American woman masquerading as her maid, Marian gets caught up in the dazzling lives of her rich neighbors as she struggles to decide between adhering to the rules or forging her own path.

In the sweltering heat of New Orleans, Anderson Galante—a washed-up wannabe exorcist—drifts between funerals and dive bars, desperate for work, or purpose. When a demented priest hires him to “cleanse” the taxidermied corpse of a teenage girl housed in his grotesque attic shrine, Anderson spirals into a surreal and morally decayed underworld where the dead speak louder than the living. Haunted by memories of a lost love and taunted by the city’s sticky, inescapable heat, he finds himself caught between delusion and damnation, chasing salvation in a city that stopped believing in it a long time ago.