Publisher's Synopsis
If you gathered together enough emotionally destructive people, helped them amplify their evil, how much damage might they cause? Could they be used as a weapon against the essence of humanity?We all know at least one ordinary emotional sinkhole, but these desperate, damaged, destructive, dangerous people are somehow being connected together, their mutual instinct for spiritual violence made physical, loosed and infectious. Six individuals, each very not-nice in their own unique way, some of which you might recognise. Plus a couple of incidental losers, who conveniently link them. Their curator boasts that they and 94 others like them will be a tipping point between positive and negative impacts, between good and evil if you like the analogy, that will complete homo sapiens' rush to species extinction.Of course that's crazy. What happens as this story opens out is too petty, too personal, too mundane (like a vicious family squabble) to really matter. The only more preposterous suggestion would be that one of these toxic narcissists could somehow be called on to save the world. No, it's more likely that the stalkings, the whispering distortions of history and manipulations of the present, and the killing when it comes, are the work of a madman who thinks he's another species; a deluded believer that we are an evolutionary failure he must euthanase. He's educated, urbane, entertainingly facile, but his ideas are fantastical-crazy. Only the leaking life-blood and jagged emotional savagery he stirs is real, clearly of our world, our familiar.This is a story that starts out violently wrenchingly indifferently cruel and finishes aching with unexpected improbable perhaps impossible love, that might move us deeply but surely would be ineffectual against the massed forces of 100 toxic people, as if such a crazy idea could be true.Still, come along for the ride. Experience a wide variety of truly bad human behavior; spot bits of relatives and friends, maybe even recognise with a chill (or thrill) some of the parts of yourself that you reveal to no-one, maybe not even yourself.The six...Janis. Deeply alluring, committed to exotic sexual fantasy, committed to her own pleasure and increasingly finding it in the subjugation of men.Jeremy. Beautiful, sensuous releaser of hidden passions who can take a woman beyond herself, who cultivates mystery while unflinchingly acting on his belief that everything is meaningless - and running from a debilitating memory.Elmore. The business success, the motivational speaker, who mercilessly exposes people to their own weaknesses, even his own son, then abruptly crumbles into the person he despises, that perhaps he always was. Even then, he seeks to rescue his own life by entrapping others.Vivienne. Catholic virgin daughter of an Italian business family patriarch and community leader, anointed heir to it all and enticed by the power and recognition, but first distracted by the need to explore another, darker and more tangled part of herself and ready to use - and discard - whoever she needs for what she wants.Olaf. Crude wastrel destroyer of businesses and families; liar, cheat, drunkard, fornicator, user of prostitutes, foul mouthed and filled with hateful spite that's rarely justified. He doesn't bother with even a nod to decent appearance or pretence of belonging to a humanity he despises. Nameoko. Terror child born with an ancient evil soul, lifelong addict, abuser, prostitute, whose almost sole interest is debasing everyone to her level...and the losers who somehow link them: Jeremy. One of life's eternal losers, an ageing puppy dog with nothing to offer and no future, a pathetic emotional cripple even to himself. Yshta. The physical cripple, who might have had the determination to succeed in life, if she wasn't barred by limitations
