One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son’s room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boy’s father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy. As the Ewings navigate the mystery of what’s become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newell’s vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. The people of are “urban nomads,” each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance. In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. is an odyssey of heartache and redemption heralding the arrival of a major new writer. “Exceptional . . . This novel deserves to be read more than once because of the extraordinary importance of its subject matter.” “Magnificent . . . a hugely ambitious novel that succeeds . . . manages to feel completely of its moment while remaining unaffected by literary trends. . . . Charles Bock is the real thing.” “A wildly satisfying and disturbing literary journey, led by an author of blazing talent.” “Wholly original—dirty, fast, and hypnotic. The sentences flicker and skip and whirl.” “An anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity . . . The language has a rhythm wholly its own—at moments it is stunning, near genius.” “From start to finish, Bock never stops tantalizing the reader.” “Rich and compelling . . . captures the hallucinogenic setting like a fever dream.”