The Hallowed Hukilau

THE HALLOWED HUKILAU

What if the afterlife wasn't a courtroom — but a luau that never ends?

Picture a shore where every creature that ever lived gathers at last: Brachiosaurus doubling as a bandstand for two-foot dragonflies, the Dodo holding court with dry wit and zero regrets, Apollonius of Tyana still arguing philosophy in the tent of sacred liquors, and a passenger pigeon reconciling — over drinks — with the ghost of the bullet that ended its kind. Humpback whales sing the Psalms nobody censored. The chicken was never dead flesh. And somewhere at the still center of it all, something vast and unexpectedly funny has been waiting, patiently, for the conversation to continue in person.

Interwoven with this cosmic feast is the story of old Hawai'i itself — the conch sounding at dawn, the kapu of peace descending over an island, hula danced on ground packed hard by generations of feet, a high priestess whose voice seems too large for her body. Sacred and ceremony, myth and reckoning, grief and its completion — braided into one shore that "knows no end and has no edges."

Equal parts theological fever dream, ecological reckoning, and Hawaiian mythic tale, The Hallowed Hukilau is for readers of Lincoln in the Bardo, A Prayer for Owen Meany, or anyone who's ever wondered what happens to the extinct, the sacrificed, and the merely mortal once the story is finally, gloriously over.

Bring your goat's head flask. It will be filled. Come as you are.  An anthology of lost Christmas & winter holiday short stories by a diverse and stimulating variety of literature's greatest authors, retrieved and presented here for the first time ever, courtesy of the cyber-scientists at the intelligence laboratories of The Temple of Scientonomy. The perfect seasonal gift for all literate life forms!