The oak slayer beetle that knits these stories together works beautifully, mirroring the emergence of our instinct to kill out of survival, desperation, grief, or vengeance. As when Bello, in a casino hotel, asks for aspirin at the front desk, instead gets Tylenol, and "pours it in to his riddled stomach, and summons again the sour, vengeful man." Try as we might, we can't fight it, and yet we do, as when Victor concocts a pesticide potion and rigs it to a sprayer on the back of his pickup, and drives, relentlessly, spraying yellow swirling clouds around the cemetery he owns, trying to save it from oak slayers. And as when Billy, the father of the imprisoned Hartley, while in the same cemetery, tells himself, "there's a rich man inside you," unable to see the poison around him.