(2009 Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction)

Ashley, a twenty-something California girl, is a post-punk who would rather be called Spike and who worries about money, her family, and freeway traffic. She’s also a violent paranoid schizophrenic living in a state facility west of Los Angeles, her disorder kept under control by confinement and the drug Prolixin.

One day Spike is shocked to find her cell door open and so she ventures out, only to find the walls smeared with blood and the staff missing or dead. She escapes and ventures into a world that’s been driven mad by waking nightmares, where she’s now the sanest

person alive. Searching for answers, Spike embarks on a road trip that will lead her from Beverly Hills to a nightmarish Texas compound to the highest office in the land...