These excerpts from Daryl Gregory’s novel, The Devil’s Alphabet, introduce the reader to a complex, post-catastrophe world where a disease called Transcription Divergence Syndrome (TDS) has divided the town of Switchcreek into distinct human clades: argos (giants), betas (seal-skinned), and charlies (fat), while a few "blanks" like the protagonist, Pax Martin, remain unchanged. Pax returns to his isolated, quarantined hometown for a funeral, which quickly spirals into an investigation of his friend Jo Lynn’s death and an immersion into the town’s political and biological struggles, primarily between Rhonda, an influential charlie who controls the volatile vintage (a fluid "produced" by some clades), and the beta Reverend Hooke. The narrative explores the deep-seated social friction between the clades and the unchanged "skips" like Pax, who discovers that Jo was attempting to expose Rhonda's corruption and that his own body has a unique, potent reaction to the vintage, making him a valuable commodity in the town’s hidden economy.
