Eli James is sixteen years old when the highway takes everything he has ever known away from him. One stretch of wet asphalt, one drunk driver, one, just one bad moment, and his whole family is smeared across twisted metal while he crawls out. Barely.

He should’ve died. Everyone says so. The cops. The coroner. Several news anchors (showing all the emotion the wet asphalt did on that fateful night). Hell, even his aunt down in Nebraska, who buys angel figurines by the dozen and writes bible verses in her Christmas cards, tells the neighbors he’s “gone to a better place. God bless his poor soul”. 

Except Eli isn’t gone. Someone pulled him out of the fire and wreckage. A man in a rust coloured jacket with scarred hands, and eyes too deep. He doesn’t call himself God, not exactly, though he has never denied it.

And Eli? Well, Eli has been given a job. The kind of job nobody in their right mind would care to do, the kind of job that comes with powers he doesn’t understand. But right now Eli isn’t in his right mind and certainly understands less than he did before that night. Every stop along the long blacktop is a test: heal or hurt, obey or resist, live or die. He never knows which choice is the right one – if there ever is one. 

Grief walks beside him. So does rage and anger and contempt for the world. And somewhere out there, in the neon glow of cheap motels and the torn leather of diner booths, other things are watching. Old things, waiting to see if Eli will rise… or break.

Because if God is really testing him, the devil can’t be far behind.

A Choir of Flies is a story about loss, about what comes after the world ends in a moment, and about how far a boy will go to discover who he really is when Heaven and Hell both want their hands on the wheel.