A darkly funny tale of "rural noir" featuring a perturbed ermine who must wrestle with the brutal realities of life on the countryside   Meet Max--he's made a name for himself as a rabid psychopath who uses random acts of violence to instigate a campaign of terror, but he feels his blood-thirsty reputation is undeserved, and wants to set the record straight. This tale portrays all the drama, beleaguered optimism, muttered jokes, and clenched terror that inform the survival, and otherwise, of its wide cast of characters. How they manage to live alongside each other is a day to day struggle with an entirely different perspective than humans, a struggle constructed to hope, chaos, violence, and all kinds of surprises--some of them pleasant, and most of them lethal.