Summary

The penultimate story in the collection, “The Resident,” follows a partially named first-person narrator, C—-M—-, who drives up to spend time at an artists’ residency in order to work on a novel. She is proud, as the home of the residency is a campground at the top of a mountain, Devil’s Throat, where she attended girl scout summer camps as a child. Her ascent driving up the mountain is full of subtle and unnerving events: stopping at a gas station, getting pulled over by a police officer for speeding, and running over a rabbit which she only finds half the body of.

After the ordeal of driving to the artists’ colony, she walks into the hotel and is greeted by a sculptor named Benjamin, a poet-composer named Lydia, a photographer named Anele, and a painter whose name is consistently forgotten...