The British barque Daphne, bound for Australia, sails from Portsmouth; crammed with colonial passengers, aristo-adventurers and frothing missionaries. Four days from Sydney the waves are wreathed in sparks, the sky runs like quicksilver, and the very sea seems to open wide and swallow…

The descendents of the Daphne’s passengers eke out a desperate life in Gutsville: a shanty-city held together with mucal slime and weed. They live in the belly of a great beast whose exterior none have seen and whose innards are all they’ve ever known. Here in the dark, lit by methane lamps, harvesting moulds from pus-polyps set into the viscera of an impossible being, a new culture has arisen: a mongrel-society of Victorian values, religious doggerel, and survivalist justice…