The Winnowing Season
Saint James of the Pasture is a village with little history and less of a future. Its iron mines have closed, its fields are overgrown and untended, and its young men have been broken by the Vietnam War. Alcohol, prescription drugs, lifeless amours, and empty fantasies have become ordinary means of survival. As 1975 draws to a close, an act of senseless violence leaves one young woman alone among the ruins of everything she’s ever known. Around her, isolation, poverty, and memory tighten their grip on the few people left behind, until the arrival of a stranger threatens to shatter their uneasy peace once again.
Hôtel Souvenir
Among the abandoned factories, fading harbor towns, and forgotten neighborhoods of the American Rust Belt, Hôtel Souvenir gathers nine interwoven stories of grief, memory, addiction, and grace. Here, ordinary lives scrape against the mystical: ragpicking women haunt forgotten alleyways, a drowning silences a winter gala, hallucinatory ruins brood over silent harbors, and the past lingers like smoke over places that refuse to disappear.
Lakeland Empire
Between a great endless water and a dying harbor town, three lives converge in a seedy shoreside motel. A paralyzed young woman mourning a mother she barely knew, her increasingly unstable sister, and a grief-stricken photographer grow entangled in one another’s lives. Haunted by memory and driven toward drink, addiction, and the desperate intimacy of a dying summer, they drift ever closer to a collision that promises either annihilation or redemption.
The Stations
A man and woman stand amid the wreckage of an adulterous love affair. Between them stands Geneva, the woman’s terminally ill cousin, inching toward an early death from a lifelong illness. As the three drift through the seamy nightworld of a dying Rust Belt city in a haze of liquor and regret, Geneva begins to lose her grip on the boundary between ordinary life and the surreal world of her art. By dawn, all three find themselves wandering the lonely highways of perdition.
Abandoned Cities
A man, en route to his lover’s home, witnesses a grisly suicide. Two friends wander a decaying slum, seeking forgiveness for an unforgivable act. A squalid night out ends in horrifying violence, while a city’s turbulent past lives on in its architecture, drawing the living into its melancholy narrative. Across nine interwoven stories of displacement, violence, grace, and depravity, a scarred city—wounded by foreign empires, revolution, and neglect—becomes an accomplice to the lives collapsing within it.
