Before he died, Saelig Zilch was a chef. Now, posthumously recruited by a shadowy agency for reasons still unknown, tasked with keeping the public safe from things that go bump in the night, he hunts monsters.

Zilch scrabbles out of a North Carolina grave in someone else's body. Someone recently dead. He only has a few days to find his bearings and carry out his latest mission, before the precious few nanobugs in his corpse shell are exhausted and he's forced to start all over at the beginning. As he trudges down the main thoroughfare, he runs into Galavance. More accurately, she runs into him with her pink Chevy Cavalier.

A case of unfortunate timing? Maybe not. Turns out the critter Zilch has been dispatched to dispatch of--a murderous were-frog--squelches uncomfortably close to the trailer Galavance calls home. And come to think of it, Galavance's boyfriend Jolby has been spending a lot of nights out lately . . .

Stuffing gross-out humor, greasy fast food, and psychedelic amphibians into a blender on high, Aftertaste is a wild ride through life, afterlife, and the American South.