David Searcy's first novel tells the story of Frank Delabano, a seventy-year-old widower who lives a perfectly quiet life in an aging tract house neighborhood, where he keeps to himself, tending the flowerbeds in his small backyard. When his beloved roses are menaced by some sort of mysterious burrowing pest, Mr. Delabano mails away for an organic remedy he sees advertised in the local paper: gopherbane, an exotic South American plant guaranteed to get rid of garden varmints "but harmless to pets and everything else." The strange, blue-flowering plants do the trick, but the claim about their being harmless to everything else proves to be false advertising--to put it mildly. As incidents of "ordinary horror" mount daily, Searcy's tale gradually builds to an unforgettable apocalyptic climax.Ordinary Horror marks the debut of a singularly original new voice in American fiction.