Gastronauts

Kerwin Merle wants for nothing because there is simply nothing that he wants. He is a spoiled, rotten man who lives alone, surviving off of meal deliveries while obsessing over the same strangers that pass his window at the same time every day.

When a storm strands a young delivery driver named Eleanor inside of his apartment with a bag of spoiled food and nowhere to go, what begins as an awkward night of shelter soon curdles into something neither of them can account for. The meals make them sick. The sickness brings strangers to the door with a name for it; they are Gastronauts, anti-gourmand fetishists who pursue enlightenment through deliberate food poisoning, devotees of a gospel built around corruption, consumption, and the body of God.

Kerwin is drawn into a communion that promises transcendence, but the deeper he goes, the less certain he becomes about what he's been eating, what he's been told, and what he's done. Gastronauts is a novel about loneliness so total it becomes its own kind of madness, about the rituals we construct to sanctify the things we cannot face, and about what's in the soup.