Roy is a lover of adventure movies, a budding writer, and a young man slowly coming of age without the benefit of a father. Surrounding him - whether to support him or to drag him under - is the adult world of postwar Chicago, a city haunted by violence, poverty, and the redeeming power of imagination. Here are charlatans, operators, alien abductees, schoolyard nudists, and fast girls with only months to live. At the center of it all is a boy learning to navigate the compromises, disillusionments, and regrets that come with the territory of living. Mixing memoir and fiction, the forty-one short stories in Sad Stories of the Death of Kings bring a city - and a boy's growing consciousness - to vivid, unflinching life.