When an offshore rig explodes and unleashes a catastrophic spill, the people of Pelerin Parish face a reckoning. As the toxic plume of oil advances across the Gulf, Boy finds himself raising a daughter he barely knows. His dying aunt, Rosa, tries to right the misdeeds of the past yet finds herself thwarted by her husband, Jacot, a retired landman for big oil who refuses to give up claim to the plot of ground where Boy makes his living. Meanwhile, the parish priest, Father Fabian lends his assistance to Boy’s all-but-motherless daughter, only to be met with suspicion. When a powerful hurricane threatens to turn an already dire situation into a total cataclysm, this sharp-edged cast of characters collides in a thunderclap of resentment and violence.

The 11 stories in LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS feature characters struggling to find a foothold in a world that is forever washing out from under them, people who must reckon with their ambivalence about belonging to a place so continually in flux. We meet a reluctant teenage mother who stows her baby in a closet to steal a night out; a spiteful retiree who sabotages his neighbor in the wake of a hurricane; a Pentecostal singer in a children's theater company who confronts the cultish leader of her troupe; a community of elderly Cajuns who conspire with a family of Sudanese immigrants to hide an escaped cow from the authorities; and a desperate young woman who tries to drag her brother to Mexico for surgery, determined to save his life and her own.