In these seven stories spanning the Midwest to California, Charles McLeod brings us characters estranged from their homelands and locked in conflict with their past and present selves. In “How to Start Your Own Midwestern Ghost Town,” an unnamed narrator hatches a plan to capitalize on rural decay. A porn star trying to transition to the mainstream does an interview with a German reporter in “The Subject of Our First Issue Is Art.” In the title story, a closeted heroin dealer follows a ghostly girl into an Oakland graveyard. And in “Rancho Brava,” the conductor of a focus group about corporate salsa keeps getting interrupted by visitors from the Old West. Alternating between the comic, the tragic, and the neurotic—and often all three at once—McLeod’s second collection transports readers from the American mainstream to the dark edges of cities and the heartland’s lost, forgotten towns, into the lives of people trying to decipher if they can escape their pasts, and at what cost.

Charles McLeod is the author of a novel, American Weather, and a collection of stories, National Treasures. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the University of Virginia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and San Jose State University, where he was a Steinbeck Fellow. He lives in Colorado.

“In Settlers of Unassigned Lands, Charles McLeod upends our concept of ‘home.’ In urban and rural settings his characters drift, ramble, and float, and find sanctuary amid desolation. With poetic eye for detail, and crushingly beautiful sentences, McLeod illuminates the gray areas between safety and alienation, giving us seven uncompromising characters suspended in moments of pained glory.”— Don Waters, author of Sunland and Desert Gothic

“Like Cortázar’s Blow-Up, McLeod’s collection is supremely innovative, prescient and cruel. I love every story in this book.”— Jillian Weise, author of The Book of Goodbyes and The Colony