Indigent

P. Djèlí Clark's Ring Shout meets Alyssa Cole's When No One Is Watching in this creeping body horror novel following the tenants of an apartment complex in a gentrifying neighborhood, the parasitic infection they contract, and what they do to survive. Leigh Pierce Estates is home to a diverse array of tenants: families, immigrants, students, the forgotten elderly. All working poor, and all in danger. Because the tenants of Leigh Pierce are disappearing. Live-in handyman Xavier seems to be the only one who notices. Or cares. After a chance encounter with the culprit leaves him infected with something horrifying, Xavier is thrust into a surreal nightmare of starvation and consumption all too familiar to his gentrifying Atlanta neighborhood. Succumbing to his infection, Xavier is drawn into the cobbled-together family squatting in Leigh Pierce's basement. People who, through a myriad of doomed roads, fell into the same self-destructive cycle of indigency, harboring dark secrets . . . and darker appetites. Trapped in a dynamic of codependency and complicity, Xavier and his family—new and old—are forced to confront the cost of survival in a world that has disregarded them.