Sometimes the opposite of love is not hate, but depravity. In these twelve stories set in the Missouri Ozarks, New Orleans, and Mississippi, Steve Yates reveals lovers clawing back from precipices of destructiveness, obsessiveness, cruelty, vanity, or greed. They seek escape and yet find new barriers, realizing true love may not be at all what they imagined. Pioneers, limestone quarry owners, young German American Civil War survivors, bankers, sex toy catalog designers, highway engineers, Pakistani terrorists, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, and furniture factory workers (who can see the future) populate these pieces. From the Ozarks of the 1830s, when locals perceive doomsday in a historic starfall, to the near future at an all-night slow-pitch softball tournament when the apocalypse looms yet again, these stories chart the dark side of love, the ties that bind families, and the sweet complications of human desire.

This collection was chosen by Sabina Murray as the eighth winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction, and was originally published by The University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. These stories first appeared in Harrington Gay Men's Literary Quarterly, The Missouri Review, Nebraska Review, Phoebe, The North Dakota Quarterly, Southwest Review, Texas Review, TriQuarterly, Turnstile, Valley Voices, and the Western Humanities Review. The story "Mila Joins the Game" was a national fiction contest winner and published in Analecta. The story "Starfall" was anthologized in The Literature of the Ozarks.