That’s How They Get Ya.

Alright. Sit down a minute. I’m going to tell you what this book is about, and you’re not going to believe me, and that’s fine. Nobody believes the fella at the campfire either, right up until the vans come.

There’s a man in here named Kidney Beans. That’s legal. He paid forty-two dollars at the courthouse to be named after a legume, on purpose, and he’s the best man I know. He finds shoes in a dumpster behind the mall and spends nineteen days trying to hand them to a fella who isn’t under his overpass anymore. That’s the whole plot, if you want it plain. A man tries to give away a pair of shoes, and by the time they find their feet, the world has quietly ended.

See, some rich folks built a little machine. Littler than little. They put it in the fancy people first, called it an enhancement, put a woman laughing on a beach on the pamphlet. And then it got out into the bread, and the melons, and the milk, and everything with a barcode on it, and the only souls it couldn’t touch were the ones nobody ever counted… the bums, the beekeepers, the plain folk plowing behind a horse, the ones eating whatever the dumpster tithed. Turns out there was something in the honey. Nobody planned that. A kitchen lady missed her grandma’s cider recipe, is the whole conspiracy, start to finish.

There’s a man in here who notices his something wrong with his orders and keeps a clipboard about it, and it costs him everything. There’s an old man in a camp out in the pines who can’t read or write, so he counts, every morning, and the number keeps going down. There’s a girl with a stack of records you have to play backwards, at a speed no machine comes set to. There’s an ex-Amish doctor keeping a ledger with a column that stays empty three years running, and he’s starting to wonder why. And there’s some people in a squash court and a boardroom and a bunker at the top of the world who decided how many of us the future needed, and got the arithmetic wrong in a way I won’t spoil, except to say, that in this book, YHVH has a sense of humor and it seems like the wicked are getting away with a little too much.

If you liked THE STAND, this is that, except shorter, and funnier, and the government doesn’t save anybody, and neither does anybody important. The janitors save each other. The kitchen ladies. The uncounted. That’s the book. Buy it or don’t. But when the bread goes gray, you’ll wish you’d read it.

That’s how they get ya.

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