Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

R.A. Lafferty's singular talent takes deadpan aim at the machinery of bureaucracy in this wildly imaginative short novel. Manuel, a census taker dispatched to the Texas towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, finds his straightforward task of counting residents spiraling into something far stranger, he begins tallying every creature that crawls, flies, or simply exists in these peculiar places, including entities that might not quite be there at all. The humor operates on multiple levels: Lafferty treats the absurd with complete seriousness, letting the comedy emerge naturally from bureaucratic language applied to the fantastical. The towns themselves become characters, their strange populations and stranger energies defying any conventional demographic analysis. As the counts mount impossibly, the story builds toward a crisis that critiques how paperwork and statistics can create their own reality, divorced from what actually exists. For readers who love language that surprises, who appreciate fiction that refuses to explain itself completely, this is American fantasy at its most inventive.