ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to everyone at MCD/FSG, including my editor, Sean McDonald, for patience and thoughtfulness. Special thanks to Debra Helfand, Rebecca Caine, Hannah Goodwin, Ben Brooks, Nina Frieman, Abby Kagan, Claire Tobin, Alex Merto, Karla Eoff, Vivian Kirklin, and Justine Gardner. Fond thanks and appreciation to my agent, Joseph Veltre, and my entertainment attorney, Alex Kohner.

Thanks to Ann for making the writing of this novel possible and for valuable feedback during various phases of its writing. Thanks to my other first readers for their kindness and comments: Matthew Cheney, Barbara J. King, Ali Sperling, Andy Marlowe, and Eric Schaller. (Thanks to reader Scott Landry for being enthusiastic about allowing me to use his name in the novel, although the character in the novel bears zero resemblance to him.)

I am indebted to Laila Abdanan for a deep first read and multiple other read-throughs while I was writing and editing the novel. She helped immeasurably with several aspects, including the camaraderie between Cass and Old Jim, the character of Jackie, and key aspects of the plot. (In addition to relating to me the house centipede story and caterpillar information, here somewhat … altered.)

Thanks to Amelia Faust for bringing to my attention the persistence of an “Area X” in bird brains. Thanks to Dr. Solomon David for detailed information on how a gar would feel held in the hands like a rifle, for the last part of this novel—as well as details about how gizzard shad shed scales.

Similarly, thank you to the following for ideas that helped in the infamous scene of Lowry [redacting] [Redacted]: Jesse Black, a fish ecologist, for describing the texture of abyssal snailfish as like “touching a firm Jell-O salad”; Gina Lloyd, a biologist, for the leaking underbelly slime of hagfish and lizard fish; Claudia Dombrowski for the slimy warty quality of toadfish skin.

Thanks to Amanda Smith, a research fisheries biologist, for a wonderful idea about how a certain kind of alligator tracker might still be working after twenty years. Thanks to Dr. Andrew Merwin, who studies insect ecology, for his thoughts on house centipedes and molts, among other topics. (House centipedes, somewhat misunderstood, are beneficial and complex organisms.)

Thanks to the biologist Emma E. Damm for various consultations, including how it would feel to have an alligator gush through the mud around you if you happened to be lying mud-bound in a blackened meadow. Also, for allowing me to use her frogs and the details of her apartment complex for the novel.

Thanks to everyone at Ology beer bar here in Tallahassee for a list of their opening and closing duties, for use with Old Jim’s proprietorship of the Village Bar. Thanks to Livvy the Mousegirl for the charming idea of “hi hi kiss,” although it did not make it into the final draft.

The idea for Lowry’s attitude toward suits came from reading Dr. Ali Sperling’s paper “Second Skins: A Body-Ecology of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy.”

The brief quote in the Mudder / Old Jim scene about how sound is a parasite needing a host is (partially condensed/adapted) from The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago by François J. Bonnet.

Finally, thanks and appreciation to Kristen Roupenian, who, as a student in a workshop I led, had the wonderful gumption to mark up a very early fragment of Absolution I left in the break room and tell me everything that was wrong with it. Without that moment, I might never have written this novel.