C can't pay her debts. Once a renowned textile artist, her husband has left her sole proprietor of a small crafts store in Lower Manhattan. He's also left C with their empty apartment, a stack of medical bills, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a funny little man with a tall red hat and a taste for systems theory.Threatened with the loss of home, livelihood and sanity, C seeks out some aid, if not charity. Her childhood friend V, now a wealthy financier, would happily assist, if only C's pride and feelings of both attachment and desire would allow her to ask for help. Instead, C paces the city's streets as protesters gather in a square downtown, her days punctuated by the developing news story of a terrorist threat to take down the national grid, plunging the United States-not to mention this novel-into darkness and chaos. .With C's sense of economic, romantic, and artistic potential all thwarted, the boundaries between her strange visitor's consciousness and C's own begin to dissipate, until C returns, finally, to her abandoned art for a final, horrifying 'project' that will allow her to regain some control over her fate. .Darkly funny and uncannily percipient, The Visitors looks at our world darkly, presenting a Pynchonesque alternate timeline in which the Occupy protests didn't sputter out; where terrorists can upload malware directly into your head; where gnomes talk like Don DeLillo. Is this science fiction? Maybe. But it feels altogether right and almost real . . . a witty but sobering message from both the recent past and our impossible future.