Calder Ayres will tell you that the leopards are the least interesting part of it. They are only doing what leopards do. What holds him is the long stretch beforehand — the years in which a household feeds them, and tells itself the arrangement is going well — and then the surprise, very late and always fresh, that the faces are their own.
He came to this by way of The God of This World, a manuscript he co-authored and prepared for the press: one man's twenty-seven-year proof that the world was ending, printed alongside his wife's corrections in the margin. He is now the author of the forthcoming Grabbing Freedom, a comedy about a bookkeeper, his wife's aggressively American family, and a goose, set in the year the accounting is called in.
Ayres holds that people almost always leave a record, and that the record almost never saves them. He reads it anyway.
A novel in the form of a found manuscript: an archivist's inquiry into the office of the Forerunner in the present age, printed as it was discovered, with his wife's corrections in the margin.
A comic novel about a small-town bookkeeper who keeps the books — and the receipts — on his wife's aggressively American family, the year the whole clan gets audited by something larger than the I.R.S. Star billing goes, as it should, to a goose.