Indigent

"Eat. They twisted in deeper. Eat. Still so simple. An impulse. Repeated again and again. Eat..." "Acid-bath class struggle intermingles with parasitic terror in Briana N. Cox's slippery, slithering, symbiotically suffocating debut." - Clay McLeod Chapman, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes "This damning portrayal of U.S. health care doubles as a potent, unforgettable creepfest." - Kirkus Reviews 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.