Indigent
Leigh Pierce Estates is home to a diverse array of tenants: working mothers, immigrants, the forgotten elderly. All working poor—and all in danger.
Because the tenants of Leigh Pierce are disappearing.
Xavier, a young Black man living in an opiate-afflicted, gentrifying Atlanta neighborhood, is thrust into a surreal nightmare of starvation and consumption after a chance encounter leaves him infected with something horrifying.
Succumbing to his infection, Xavier is drawn into the cobbled-together family squatting in Leigh Pierce’s basement: A patriarch and matriarch from the Rust Belt whose health left with the Ford factories forty years ago, a first-gen American who learned that the institutions supposedly there to help were not a real option… People who, through a myriad of roads, fell into the same self-destructive cycle of indigency, harboring dark secrets and darker appetites.
Now, Xavier is forced to confront the cost of survival in a world that has disregarded him, lost in a messy family dynamic of codependency and complicity all too like what he’s used to—a dynamic he’s desperate to break.
Publication Date: March 20, 2026
Preorder Now!
Preorder it now direct from our shop and receive it earlier!
Trade Paperback
Hardcover
Digital Editions
Signed Editions
Read a Sample
Book Details
| Availability | |
|---|---|
| Available Editions |
About The Author
Briana N Cox
Briana N Cox is a queer, Black writer born and raised in rural Tennessee. She’s the oldest of seven children and a first-generation college graduate with a Master’s degree in speech-language pathology. You can find her short stories in the Bookends Review Best of 2020 Anthology. She is a 2020 TN Playwrights Studio fellow in addition to being a 2024 Stage 32 Feature Screenplay fellow recently featured on the 2024 Next List for up-coming screenwriters.
Clay McLeod Chapman –
“Picture Nick Cutter’s The Troop adapted by Bong Joon Ho, where the acid-bath class struggle of Parasite intermingles with parasitic terror in Briana N Cox’s slippery, slithering, symbiotically suffocating debut.”
Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
Preston Fassel –
“Briana N Cox has written Shivers for the Get Out generation with Indigent. A thoughtful, complex look at the intersection of gentrification and the ongoing opioid epidemic, as explored through the lens of a body-horror, creature-feature phantasmagoria.”
Preston Fassel, author Our Lady of the Inferno
Tiffany Morris –
“With stunning, visceral prose and memorable characters, Briana N Cox deftly intertwines body horror and class consciousness to explore interconnection in its more terrifying expressions. Indigent writhes on the page and lingers with the reader long after.”
Tiffany Morris, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of Green Fuse Burning
Erin E. Adams –
“Utterly engrossing. Briana N Cox takes what slips through the cracks and brings it into the light. An intricate and searing examination of how the medical system fails those most in need. Indigent is devastatingly timely.”
Erin E. Adams, author Jackal & One of You
Markus Redmond –
“With Indigent, Briana N Cox has crafted a scathing indictment of America’s healthcare system wrapped in a tale that will creep under your skin &heliip; Not just because it’s an excellently written tale of horror, but because it reads all too real.”
Markus Redmond, author Blood Slaves
Johanna van Veen –
“Both a sharp indictment of the US healthcare system and a tightly plotted thriller, Indigent will invade your mind and body and not let go even after you have read the final page.”
Johanna van Veen, best-selling author of Blood on Her Tongue