Morgan Thomas

Set in a contemporary USA in which rising sea levels force dozens of families to leave their Gulf Coast homes, Lazarus Specimen follows two siblings on their five-day journey from Florida to Nevada. Ever is a graduate student struggling through a taxonomy dissertation. Meli, Ever’s sister, was recently expelled from a Christian seminary for stalking and threatening a male professor. Despite deep ideological differences and a long period of estrangement, both siblings feel a need to reunite with the other, their only family and support. Early in their trip, Ever finds several specimens of an organism they believe to be Ainsworth’s salamander (Plethodon ainsworthi), a species which has been presumed extinct since the 1960s. This discovery sends their road trip careening off course, and tensions between the two siblings escalate, culminating in a chilling act of violence. The novel asks how much we might compromise, when faced with extinction, to believe ourselves saviors, and how much we might sacrifice, confronting isolation, to maintain even a ghost of connection. Borrowing loosely and deliberately from The Grapes of Wrath, Lazarus Specimen turns Steinbeck’s canonized novel of weather-driven migration on its head to explore privilege, movement, and family in the 21st century.