Bravely dipping a pen in the ink of his own soul, Pickett’s novels chart a winding path from divorced, struggling writer in the throes of an existential crises, to celebrated author.

Kendra immediately shot up and turned back to the Home. The man from the day before in the Eating Hall—the one in the long coat, turning his head about the Homers, with the strange, transparent contraption resting on his nose, making his eyes appear double large—stood now in front of the Home’s entrance.

At the bus stop bench, he looks like a salvaged medical experiment, but he sits there, with the shotgun wound in his head, and passers-by crane their necks to get a better view at the freak show which is Stuart. Remington blast leftovers. With the self-inflicted crater in his brow healed up six-months by now, he sits sweating in the hot afternoon sun and glares out boldly at traffic with his one remaining good eye. And as the cars rush by, each tinted face inside stares; stunned by the puzzling disfigurement which they can’t quite put their finger on. Though above all else, one thing is Stuart’s greatest torment to date: With a single hazel eye can he now easily divine every shift of recognition at his violence to another heart done.

There are always clues. Sometimes it’s as simple as a new sound. It’s the clicking fingernails of a small dog scurrying against hardwood floors, when you have neither. It’s the way the air tastes. It could be that the pillows are too thin, or the texture of unfamiliar sheets against your skin. But it’s always something, and you know immediately. Without realizing how you got there, or even opening your eyes, you know that you are in a strange bed, and it is unsettling.

Kendra hardly slept at all that night. Falling in and out of consciousness, her insides twisted with nervous anticipation, and liquid dreams brought her in and out of imagined crevices within the dark surroundings—a place of distant birds calling to one another, of small animal feet crackling twigs underfoot, of Top Fire only knows what else. No one ever spoke of what existed in the Surrounding of the Home.