To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone

Call it Absurdist Realism. Call it Midwestern Gothic. Call it a book of stories that get a hold of your head and heart. Whatever you call it, To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone takes us to the edge of lived experience and guides us to look back in wonder at essential elements of humanness: hope, grief, confusion, joy. While the worlds and characters in each of these stories arrive fresh and distinct---A woman drives through Central Illinois returning lost baggage, accompanied by her mother’s toothless mini-poodle; a couple finds their lives weighed with 3D printings of their baby’s fetus after a miscarriage; a rag-tag group spends every day together in an abandoned and repurposed pharmacy, the shelves still filled with out-dated stock, while they up-skill for promised minimum-wage jobs---we grab hold of a throughline: the book spills over with people building and breaking idols to find love and survival where they can. And we cheer them on at each step.