"I think of the pendulum swinging, disaster waiting . . . I seem to be the only one who thinks so. That our lives become fictions with the passage of each day." Poet Paul Nelson's fiction debut is the swirling, hyperkinetic portrait of the unspoken divide between two friends and neighbors from now-vanished worlds: Sam, an elderly sailor haunted by recurring images of a beautiful heiress rescued from the sea, and Tom, a daydreaming "back-to-the-lander," rumored hippie and writer in 1970s Maine who watches the gradual disintegration of his marriage. Bridging the gulf between the two men, through twelve intricately interconnected stories and novellas, is a wild communal landscape populated by recluses, murderers, religious fundamentalists and free-spirited handymen--all of them inextricably caught in the overlapping webs of language, narrative and violence that dominate the deceptively simple rhythms of traditional coastal life.