Roaring south in a black Cadillac, John Smith is on the road trip from Hell through a nightmarish version of Americana, a place of rotting hollows and dusty crossroads, slaughterhouses and haunted trains. He doesn’t know how he woke up after sitting down in the electric chair, where he got the black suit with the slit up the back or even the cigarettes in his pocket. All he knows is that there is a woman guarding a great secret and he’s supposed to kill her.

“Great powers comin’ your way and you need to be prepared,” Godmamma said, voice a papery whisper. “The harpies of the north manipulated a holy man into a great working but it’s all fallin’ apart. Men that was dead walk again. You know them, chile. You seen their work.” Light slashed across the far wall. “Them in the black car?” She remembered the big man with icy eyes laying waste to her people. “Them in the black car,” the old woman said, voice rising over the engine’s growl. “Four of them. Tied to you.” “I didn’t want—” “They an insult to the natural order and so was that Hand of Glory you worked,” Godmamma interrupted. “When you reached out with that dead hand,” and here the old woman closed her eyes and mimed feeling about blindly, “they cleaved to each other’s wrongness an’ you grabbed their strings.” Godmamma clenched her hand in a fist, knuckles bulging as if they would split her skin. “You worked a mighty hex and someone used your play for they own ends. Now them that was below is comin’ up. The end of what we know and beginnin’ of somethin’ new. You gotta do your part, Hoodoo Girl.”