Manifest Destiny drives American expansion westward, building an early 19th-century society with genocidal brutality. This is the context that frames The Revelator's protagonist: a young orphan named Joseph. Reared on nights spent carousing with drunks and con men, the young protagonist dreams of something more.He begins to preach. Soon he takes a young wife, to the horror of her father, a butcher. They depart for the wilderness where Joseph's visions, haunted by a dark Beast, take hold of his life. Husband and wife nearly die of exposure, and upon their return, Joseph begins to build his congregation, built on the discovery of the golden plates that deliver the Almighty's message.As his congregation grows, Joseph builds a settlement, takes multiple wives, and negotiates multiple betrayals and intrigues with his followers, his wife, and even his suspicious and distant son. Persecuted by society at large, and on the U.S. government's watch list, Joseph takes his...

Robert Kloss's The Alligators of Abraham is a fever dream built from the fly-strewn corpses of armies, the megalomania of generals, the madness of widows, the fires of mourning, the fury of the poor, the indifference of the wealthy, and the ravenous hissing of those alligators who have ever plagued the shores of our national nightmares. With a cover design and interior illustrations by Matt Kish, author of Tin House's Moby-Dick in Pictures, this is a Civil War epic unlike any others.

In pursuit of the lives wrecked by disease and wracked by cough, How the Days of Love & Diphtheria follows one son who accidentally replaces another, until the family can no longer tell the dead from the living, and the mounds of bodies continue to swell.