Welcome to Las Vegas. Hope you like it here. You aren’t leaving.

It’s a Las Vegas of outcasts, outsiders, obsessives, and oddballs—a place seen through the eyes of those who call it home in Extinction Studies.

In these stories, a young genius from a troubled home becomes obsessed with solving an infamous atomic-era murder. Twin brothers exploring subterranean tunnels beneath the Strip encounter a stranger who claims he can show them the future. A nonverbal boy devises a daring scheme to revive his punch-drunk prizefighter father’s fading glory. And in the title story, a teenager struggling in the aftermath of a traumatic event finds healing in B monster movies and a TV host who’s a cross between Dracula and Elvis.

Shane Joaquin Jimenez’s short stories deliver you far beyond the glitz and neon of the Strip. Across ten haunting tales, Jimenez takes a whirlwind tour of dark stage magic, macabre murder, moonlit desert graves, and the city’s unknown, unlucky underdogs fighting to the bitter end, no matter the odds.

Told with brutal honesty that is at turns uncanny and unsettling, nightmarish and psychedelic, exhilarating and moving, Extinction Studies uncovers the ineradicable hope at the heart of the strange neon city, shining out in the middle of nowhere.

Shane Joaquin Jimenez is a native son of Las Vegas. He is the author of a previous novel, the noir thriller Bondage, hailed as “a blistering debut” by Meg Gardiner. His stories can be found in The Best American Mystery and Suspense, The Cincinnati Review, EPOCH, Starlite Pulp Review, Shotgun Honey, and elsewhere. He lives with his family on a rainy island in British Columbia.