The Slough

The setting is Ketchikan, Alaska, an idyllic port town seated at the westernmost edge of the Tongass Rainforest in Southeast Alaska. As blobs of sticky goo begin falling on the coastal settlement, tourists and townsfolk start to succumb to a bizarre illness, reviving memories of the Oakville incident that occurred in the State of Washington back in 1994. Under a communication blackout, symptoms of the disease progress from flu-like to something far more serious when an unlikely group of misfits and conspiracy theorists decide to hunt down the unknown contagion to its source. Meet Jim, a retired teacher and failed author; Fred, Jim’s neighbor, who spends his spare time gleefully prepping for the apocalypse; Macintyre, a former commercial pilot who drank himself out of the cockpit; and Bob, stealth camper and YouTube influencer who lives in a house the size of a closet. Let’s not forget the Ixt—a Tlingit “herbalist” with drug-induced visions of fleshless creatures inhabiting the once-peaceful lands of his ancestors. And finally, we have Sneeves, an old and jaded high school English teacher with impossible expectations, despised by students, parents, and administrators alike. As this group of unlikely comrades struggle to expose the unthinkable, a government bent on concealing the truth increasingly chokes the frontier town into isolation from the rest of the world. In a town ravaged by a skin-devouring plague, can resilience be found in the scars left behind?