In his follow up to 'The end of vandalism', Drury depicts a quiet, Midwestern October weekend in the lives of the Darling family, whose members all want something without knowing how to get it: for Charles, an heirloom shotgun; for his wife, Joan, the imaginative life she once knew; for their young son, Micah, a knowledge of the scope of his world, aided by prowling the empty town at night; and for Joan's daughter, Lyris, a stable home where she can begin to grow up ...