“Cody Luff’s debut, Ration, is creepy, sci-lit brilliance. He administers a slow, suspenseful drip of horror that grows like a pool of black ink until we are all part of his world. I will never forget this peculiar, stunning debut.”
—tammy lynne stoner, award-winning author of Sugar Land
All the girls who live in the Apartments are forced to weigh their own hunger against the lives of their neighbors. When Cynthia is wrongly accused of ordering an “A” ration, a high-calorie meal made from the body of one of her friends, she is punished with brutality at the hands of the other girls and exile from the only home she’s ever known. It’s a death sentence—one that Elisabet Tuttle, the girls’ headmistress, hopes will encourage the others to stay in line. But as she loses her grip on the Apartments, Elisabet grapples with an overseeing council that grows more and more impatient with her mistakes.
Inside the Apartments, madness reigns: the needs of the society dominate the needs of the individual. Outside, Cynthia finds a world ravaged by scarcity, but also an unlikely ally in one of the women who tormented her for years. Motivated not by self-preservation, but instead by revenge, Cynthia will stop at nothing to find justice for the girls in the Apartments. Set in the far future, Ration is an unflinching take on the ways in which society can harm the very people it seeks to protect.
Cody Luff’s stories have appeared in Pilgrimage, Cirque, KYSO Flash, Menda City Review, Swamp Biscuits & Tea, and others. He is the fiction winner of the 2016 Montana Book Festival Regional Emerging Writers Contest and served as editor of the short fiction anthology Soul’s Road. Cody holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. He teaches at Portland Community College and works as a story editor.
