Philip Themio Stoddard

Tired and overworked, Lacey comes home to discover her boyfriend Miles has not only neglected to clean the apartment, he's left a disturbing surprise in the refrigerator: rapidly growing "shrooms" that he acquired from a sketchy janitor. The couple's initial curiosity leads to terror as the mushrooms take over their kitchen, minds, and ultimately bodies.

In the sweltering heat of New Orleans, Anderson Galante—a washed-up wannabe exorcist—drifts between funerals and dive bars, desperate for work, or purpose. When a demented priest hires him to “cleanse” the taxidermied corpse of a teenage girl housed in his grotesque attic shrine, Anderson spirals into a surreal and morally decayed underworld where the dead speak louder than the living. Haunted by memories of a lost love and taunted by the city’s sticky, inescapable heat, he finds himself caught between delusion and damnation, chasing salvation in a city that stopped believing in it a long time ago.