Scavengers

Abstract

Scavengers is a short novel that addresses fatherlessness, anxiety, and medieval weaponry from five different third-person-limited viewpoints, taking place over about twelve hours in a single city block on a single August day in Omaha, Nebraska. The novel represents the expansion of a set of flash fictions sharing a similar voice and emotional subject matter into a single narrative of connected, modular scenes. The plot resembles that of a psychological thriller—a Midwestern Gothic involving ordinary, if anxious, people in extraordinary circumstances—but remains character-based rather than driven by thriller genre conventions.