Budget cuts drive a burned-out humanities professor to master the art of annihilation. A girl on the verge of a transformation seeks out a new member for her isolated, inhuman family. A glitching brain implant shatters its owner's sense of reality. A high-school athlete's body becomes the vessel of a fleshy apocalypse. In Shaky Pictures of Vanished Faces, characters twist in the grip of forces beyond their understanding. Infused with the weird and uncanny, these stories probe the crannies and dead ends where humanity confronts the implacably alien, where even the most familiar faces begin to change, waver, and fade.