The Idol

Sigrid Kant is a beautiful monster.

A young social media influencer—whose widowed mother was recently murdered under mysterious circumstances—Sigrid has been scouted out by an entrepreneur named Teddy Zeist and invited to an unnamed Southeast Asian country to model for a local beer brand’s advertising campaign. Zeist recognizes that Sigrid is a rare type of individual in possession of a powerful, uncanny charisma, and feels it will translate into photos for the campaign.

However, while some people are not affected by Sigrid’s magnetism, those who are most strongly bewitched experience the strange compulsion to sacrifice their lives to her in order to prove their devotion.

And sometimes, Sigrid puts this phenomenon to use for very personal reasons...

“If you know something about Jeffrey Thomas’s fiction, you’ll know that when he’s not writing Weird SF stories set in the infamous and crime-ridden Punktown he sometimes explores “the unnamed country.” This country resembles the Viet Nam that Thomas has frequently visited, but…Viet Nam as seen through a lens slightly distorted by, or perhaps slightly sharpened by, imagination.” —Brian Evenson, author of Good Night, Sleep Tight.

“Jeffrey Thomas’s unique flair for the unspeakable never shines brighter than when he visits the Southeast Asia of his dreams.” —Cody Goodfellow, author of Vertical.