Sunshine on an Open Tomb. Tim Kinsella

Set in fall 1988, <i>Sunshine On An Open Tomb</i> shuttles between two storylines: the creation of The CIA as a result of the Texas/Kingdom oil connection, and a love triangle involving the moon. Our narrator is the brooding runt of a political dynasty whose father is about to be appointed Prez. He is thoughtful, but has trouble expressing himself due to his many physical defects as a result of inbreeding. Desperate for content at the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, even our narrator is suddenly of interest to The Media. So after years of living freely among The Barbarians, The Family hides him away in one of its secret hideouts. Exhausted by the shape-shifting estate and his irresolvable love life, our narrator cloisters himself deep in the estate’s bunker and constructs a tomb around himself out of soup cans. Here he gets to work correcting the best-selling, so-called objective biography of The Family.