A guidebook introduces foreign visitors to a recognizable but dreamlike
America, where mirrors are haunted and the Statue of Liberty wears a
bowler hat. A department-store supervisor must discipline employees who
don't smile enough at customers, but finds himself unexpectedly drawn to
the saddest of them all. A woman reluctantly agrees to buy her daughter
a robot pet, then is horrified when her little girl chooses an enormous
mechanical spider for a companion. The characters in these stories find
that the world they thought they knew has shifted and changed, become
bizarre and disorienting, and, occasionally, miraculous. Told with
absurdist humor and sweet sadness, Viral is about being lost in places
that are supposed to feel like home.