The world ended not with a bang, but with a grain of pollen on a puff of wind. People called them serpent weeds, and they consumed all the crops and eventually entire cities and civilization itself. A power rose from the ashes calling itself the Divine Rite, and they asserted a deadly new order in this ravaged world. Putting survivors to the test in a most literal way, they devised a yearly test called Justification. Pass and you can live. Fail, and you receive your Last Supper. This is the only life John Welland ever knew. But after his wife receives her final feast, he gradually immerses himself in a new rebellion, with a group of underground revolutionaries fighting to escape the Divine Rite’s reach. But the farther they travel across America’s haunted landscape, the more surreal and alien everything becomes. Not just the weeds, or the creatures with extraordinary powers, but John himself.

“Marrying speculative, realistic, and fabulist traditions to dystopian formula, Dickson’s paean to individualism both breaks and strengthens the heart. Welland’s character receives “no comfort as he comes face to face with his own tragedy.” The Kafkaesque world of warped normalcy and cruel politics brings intimacy to the classic theme of self-definition in the face of oppression.”