There's a pig man at your window, and he's hungry.

A hideous face hides a beautiful soul, physical perfection conceals monstrosity, death becomes eternal life, and the greatest liar of them all must learn to tell the truth, and do the one right thing.

This is the world of Imago.

Something has gone very wrong with this world. Changed freaks, victims of the Human Mutational Virus, roam California's streets. DisLex, the entertainment utility, monitors everyone's lives; yet few know that DisLex not only controls life, it has created it: perfect virtual constructs who can never die - the Imagos.

DisLex chairman Harmon Jacques wanted to grow up to rule the world. He's well on his way. For the freaks, he's built Camp Roberts: the outcasts go in, but the only way they come out is in a body bag. For everyone else, he's created the PerfectTown, home for the Imagos, and the way the future is going to be.

Chief among the Imagos is a guy named Dick, a virtual reconstruction of the memories of the 37th President of the United States: Richard M. Nixon. When Dick meets Harmon's idealistic young assistant Julie Curtez, Imagos and freaks are set on a collision course that will either destroy their world, or redeem it.

"Amy Sterling Casil is a rising star, joining the brightest new constellation of science fiction."
— David Brin, author of Infinity's Shore

"Robert Louis Stevenson tells us that 'we've never made a statue worthy of our dreams,' and that's happily true, because it keeps writers like Amy hard at work carving new statues . . . watching her work, and seeing the results, has sent me down to the quarry for a new block of marble myself more than once. Amy's a prodigious dreamer, and that she's got some statues that are about as worthy as they come."
— James P. Blaylock, author of Homunculus

"Amy Sterling Casil's first novel fulfills the promise of her excellent short stories."
— Mike Resnick, author of Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia

"Amy Sterling Casil suffers from an acute case of loving visionary heart. It overflows, spills over into words, brimming with droplets of profundity, emotion, pain, truth and the deepest humanity. She writes like a rainstorm upon the parched earth of your imagination."
— Vera Nazarian, author of Dreams of the Compass Rose

About the Author:

Amy Sterling Casil is a Southern California science fiction writer. A 1984 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop at MSU; she received her MFA from Chapman University in 1999. Her first collection of short fiction and poetry, Without Absolution, was published last year by Wildside Press to positive reviews. She has contributed cover stories to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and her short fiction appears in other science fiction and fantasy magazines and anthologies. She has received a number of honorable mentions in the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror and Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies, and other short fiction awards and nominations. She teaches at Chapman University and lives in her hometown of Redlands, California, with her daughter Meredith and the world's best dog, Badger. Imago is her first novel.