Winner of the 2022 ReLit Awards
Finalist 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 ofVanishing Monuments
"[The] writing is beautiful... Nightmarish and yet somehow fantastical."—This Magazine