No matter what we think we are achieving, eventually, imperial wars come home to roost. Kept secrets fester and leak, observed violence hangs around and revisits, and a city’s trauma embeds itself in its institutions.

An eighteen year old realizes his mortality and is punished for it by his peers; a soldier returns from the wars only to realize he’s teaching the colonized in his own city; a young couple go to Central America and see the effects of the West on class and opportunity; members of a platoon hunt to find a traitorous Afghan spy; and a man spends his days adhering to a strict and ridiculous routine to ward off the bad magic that is always around the corner. This book’s setting shifts in time and place but forever casts the main character of The Chicago East India Company as someone trying to maintain his sanity, his humanity, and his kindness as the state and its bureaucratic machinations unknowingly try to take them away.