When Bridget Atkisson goes missing her second year of college, her autistic boyfriend travels to Mississippi in search of a backwoods cult, the Children of Merriment. Zoey Bryce tags along, as a pair of old friends from high school head to California looking for insight from a surviving Manson family member. Things quickly go south, when they entrust in a local YouTube celebrity who refused to grow up behind locked doors reinforced by social radicalism.
Jonathan “Swag” Saunders nearly brought about end of the humanity once before. Does he stand a chance against a charismatic leader among misguided women, or will Zoey have to save his girl for him despite chasing her own ghosts ever since her boyfriend’s untimely death?
Aaron Tucker is the author of the forthcoming novel Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys with Coach House Books on June 6th, 2023. His essay “A Cowboy’s Work” was longlisted for the 2022 CBC Non-Fiction Prize and is part of a work-in-progress collection of essays.
Tucker’s latest poetry collection is Catalogue d’oiseaux (Book*hug Press, Spring 2021). His novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) was translated by Rachel Martinez into French as Oppenheimer (La Peuplade) in the summer of 2020. In addition, he is the author of two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrave Macmillan).
He is currently a PhD candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University where he is an Elia Scholar, a VISTA doctoral Scholar and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral fellow. He is currently studying the cinema of facial recognition software and its impacts on citizenship, mobility and crisis.
He was born in Vernon B.C. and grew up in Lavington B.C., on the lands of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Currently, he is a guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory.