Twelve new stories that teeter between wicked humor and stinging pathos, all told in a voice that the Boston Globe called "so relentless and felonious that you ought to need a permit to carry it." Thom Jones's world encompasses dilapidated right arenas, state mental hospitals, and chaotic emergency rooms. The inhabitants are his brilliantly etched characters, who battle desperately against fate in a game of life they cannot win but dare not lose.