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3.75 stars

Eli Cranor specializes in writing novels about the working class, so we’re back in familiar territory here. We’re in a small town in Arkansas where the principal industry is the raising and processing (slaughter) of chickens. The plant manager is ruthlessly ambitious, driving his employees to process ever larger numbers of birds in service of his intention to be promoted up the ladder. And the plant is an absolute hellscape that drives the workers to their physical breaking point: 10 hours on their feet, endlessly repeating the same motion, no bathroom breaks allowed, so they work in diapers or piss in their clothes where they stand and continue working. The focus is on two couples: a young Mexican man and woman, undocumented even though they’ve been in the States since they were infants, working at the plant for subsistence wages for nine years now, living in a trailer park, trying to save and get ahead, but with no real hope of making it; and the plant manager and his wife, parents of a six-month-old boy, living in a large, well-appointed house, with fancy vehicles, etc., etc., with a large debt burden, of course. These two very different worlds clash after a triggering event at the plant, and the tension builds until everything erupts into shocking violence.