Set in the late days of the Great Depression, The French Stranger is about Fred Dumas, who has been cursed (or blessed) with an abnormally long set of middle fingers, which serve him well as a "digitator," or "a bum twaddler," working for M'Lady: a Ladies Discreet Pleasure company that offers "Specialized Discrete Services For Adventurous Females." However they are also the cause of the death of Bunny Meyers, the wife of a wealthy Savannah man named Swoop Meyers. Her death, at the hands of a gigolo, could spell doom for his mayoral bid, so he must find Dumas and deal with him before the news gets out. More specifically: The French Stranger spins a sprawling, epic, and absurd, Southern Gothic tale that includes chicken boxing, Chick-O-Stick candy bars, Tampax, voodoo, spiritualism, murder, an evil 10-year-old hit man, eccentric Southerners, a corrupt newspaper man, the nascent rise of black power, the early days of television, idiocy, insanity, megalomania, equinophilia, canisnasusvenarism, colposbrachiopathy, World War One, Nazis, German POW camps, Lapland, the Tong Wars, Ragnarök, circus freaks, a sapient pig, Buddhism, Socialism, greed, decay, the macabre and grotesque, wealth and power, debauchery, fantasy, nirvana, science fiction, ghosts, surrealism, Time Theory, Quantum Theory, the snail telegraph, competitive eating, and so much more.
