A dentist from New Jersey, marooned at midnight in the Florida swamps, makes the mistake of falling into the clutches of a hilariously depraved family of amateur surgeons devoted to a 17th-century libertine whose discovery of an elixir has kept his evil presence alive for the past three-hundred years.
The author wrote this about his novel:
I was down in Florida with my family, visiting a zoo that harbors a variety of reptiles and other exotic animals. We were part of a small audience watching a zookeeper demonstrate how to put an alligator to sleep by stroking its up turned belly. Something about that man fondling that alligator amused me so much that it struck me with a revelation: I had just met one of my characters. Not long after that I sat down at my keyboard and began to wonder what kind of voice this embryonic character might have - and what he might want to say. After a while I found myself typing the following sentence:
A sink had fallen on the Komodo monitor and busted up its head pretty bad.
After that sentence appeared, the zookeeper Lemuel Lee Frobey and his Uncle Earl started walking around their family-owned reptile park named Lizard World. I wrote a half dozen pages, but put them aside and tried to forget about them. They just seemed so strange: I couldn't believe this was the novel my capricious Muse was asking me to write.
But after several months, I found that I simply couldn't write anything else. Take it or leave it, said the Muse. And so I said, Well, okay, I'll take it. I went back to my pages - and the words started flowing again. That is when the dentist, whose acquaintance I'd made in an earlier little book I'd written, suddenly found himself in this new book, driving down at night into the heart of the Florida swamps.
After that I had a number of other hunches. Each one was an idea I found myself so drawn to that I couldn't leave it out. For example, I had long wanted to write about a P...
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