Lisa Moore's Alligator moves with the swiftness of a gator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters in contemporary St. John's, Newfoundland—a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in Flannery O'Connor country. Its denizens jostle each other in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, lust, and ambition, while yearning for purity, depth, and redemption.