Natalie Gail Harpe

After moving to a small rural town, uptight Joel Bixby, is invited by an agreeable new acquaintance to join a group of townsmen who meet in a ramshackle room at the edge of town. Normally a loner, Joel finds himself enamored by boisterous fast-food connoisseur Leo Applegate and reluctantly agrees to go. Unknowingly the replacement for a beloved member who recently passed away, Joel meets the group's other surviving members and is swept into their strange lives, but struggles with their secretive purpose for gathering until he realizes each of them is as lost as himself.