The town at the bottom of a phosphate quarry is a depraved and twisted paradise, covered in white dust. Its inhabitants are like escaped freak show performers, grotesque individuals with their own unquenchable passions. They wait for the mining company to return and for the phosphate plant, in whose shadow they while away their time at the bottom of the pit, to resume operation.
But the fate of the town and its inhabitants is taken into the hands of a former go-go dancer named Dolly, who once won the title of Phosphate Queen in a beauty pageant.
Sternly and often cruelly, she dominates the situation, breaking lives and turning Garden Hills into a tourist trap that only the most twisted mind could devise.
The carnival of surrealism and wild antics, perpetrated because all of Crewes's characters seem to live and act in a vacuum, soon fades into the background compared to the writer's mastery of humanizing even such heroes, even in such impossible circumstances.