An ambitious debut told in dazzlingly precise prose, We Eat Our Own follows an international film crew to the Amazon in the 1970s and explores the forces that underlie human violence and the faint borderline between art and life.

For his latest film, Italian pulp horror director Ugo Velluto has a radical vision—one that requires abandoning green screens to film on-site in a remote outpost in the Colombian rain forest, and keeping his actors in the dark about what the script contains.

No one is more befuddled than his lead actor, an untried American fished from a New York acting school as a last minute fill-in. Thrust into scenes beside tribal natives, Spanish-speaking locals and an Italian crew he doesn’t understand, this actor—whom Ugo insists on calling only by his character’s name, Richard—quickly realizes he’s out of his depth.

But neither Richard nor the rest of the film crew is aware of the threats lurking in the nearby town and the sprawling shadow economy that powers it—an economy spurred by an unscrupulous American expat, fueled by drugs and guerilla insurgents working in tense collaboration and unpoliced by any outside government. Even Ugo doesn’t seem to know how his crew’s arrival has thrown the town’s equilibrium dangerously out of balance.

As Ugo’s shocking demands stir tension among his cast and crew, and the secrets of the town threaten to boil over, all must decide which roles they will—and won’t—play in this daring artistic experiment gone wrong. Written with verve, intensity and a penetrating eye for the intricate politics of a regime teetering on the edge, We Eat Our Own is a resounding literary debut, a thrilling journey and a thoughtful commentary on violence and its repercussions.