Lisa Moore's Alligator moves with the swiftness of a gator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters in a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O'Connor country. Madeleine, the driven, ageing filmmaker whose mission is to complete a Bergmanesque magnum opus before she dies Frank, a young man of innocence and determination whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers Valentin, the sociopathic Russian refugee whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters Colleen, at seventeen, a hard-edged female Holden Caulfield, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive.