Blood Fable-the new work of fiction from OisÔin Curran-is a Jules Verne-esque fantastical tale filled with Back-to-the-Land ideology and North American Zen Buddhism. In 1980, a utopian Buddhist community on the coast of Maine called New Pond is on the verge of collapse. New Pond's charismatic leader demands complete adherence to his authority, and slowly, his followers come to the realization that they've been exploited for too long. The eleven-year-old son of one of those adherents is dimly aware of the concerns of the adult world. Yet his imagination provides a refuge both from the difficulties of his parents' lives-including his mother's newly discovered cancer-and from the boredom and casual brutality of school. To distract his parents and himself from their collective troubles, the boy claims to remember his own life before birth. His purported memory, which is the story within the story of Blood Fable, is an epic tale about the search for a lost city refracted through the lens of the adventure stories he loves. As the world around them falls apart, the boy and his parents find that his strange story often seems to predict the events taking place in the world around them.