American desert

Theodore Street is driving towards the ocean where he plans to drown himself. But on the way he is hit by a van and he sails through the windscreen, his head sliced from his body. At this funeral days later, he sits up in his coffin, apparently resurrected. Theodore becomes an object of derision and morbid curiosity to the press, a prized specimen for scientists and Satan incarnate to an obscure religious cult deep in the desert.

Fascinating, surreal and wildly satirical, Percival Everett sends up the press, religion, UFOs and the military, and offers a meditation on what it is to be alive.