When an offshore rig explodes and unleashes a catastrophic spill, the people of Pelerin Parish, a Louisiana bayou community, face a reckoning that tests the bonds of family and the survival of their way of life. Boy Broussard is raising a daughter he barely knows. His dying aunt, Rosa Terrebonne, tries to right the misdeeds of the past yet is thwarted by her husband, Jacot, a retired landman for big oil who refuses to give up claim to the plot of ground where Boy makes his living. Meanwhile, Father Fabian lends his assistance to Boy’s all-but-motherless daughter, only to be met with suspicion and hostility. When a powerful hurricane threatens to turn an already dire situation into a total cataclysm, this sharp-edged cast of characters collides in a thunderclap of resentment and violence. 

The 11 stories in LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS feature characters struggling to find a foothold in a world that is forever washing out from under them, people who must reckon with their ambivalence about belonging to a place so continually in flux. We meet a reluctant teenage mother who stows her baby in a closet to steal a night out; a spiteful retiree who sabotages his neighbor in the wake of a hurricane; a Pentecostal singer in a children's theater company who confronts the cultish leader of her troupe; a community of elderly Cajuns who conspire with a family of Sudanese immigrants to hide an escaped cow from the authorities; and a desperate young woman who tries to drag her brother to Mexico for surgery, determined to save his life and her own.