"It's legitimate SF, and it's 'mainstream,' and it's metafiction: I don't know anyone else doing quite what Lain is doing; fascinating work, moving, strikingly honest, powerful."--Rich Horton, Locus Magazine Gore Vidal meets Philip K. Dick in this collection of "lit-fabulist" stories. Douglas Lain's work has been attracting high profile attention throughout the genre, and this collection features some of his finest and most controversial fiction. These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even nuclear Armageddon as comic foils for Lain's everyman characters. Here is an America where the packets of Sea Monkeys that arrive in the mail contain secret messages and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week's Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.