Laurie Notaro is known and loved for her brilliant, self-deprecating true stories of everyday mishaps and mayhem. Now, she's just going to go ahead and make them up-with hilarious results. THERE'S A (SLIGHT) CHANCE I MIGHT BE GOING TO HELL is everything you'd expect from Notaro—dazzling scenarios involving murderous raccoons, meth labs, and Chub Rub-set against a backdrop of small-town eccentricities, pyromania, and one irresistibly weird beauty pageant.

Maye Roberts is thrilled to be moving to Spaulding, Washington. The gorgeous, bucolic haven couldn't be further from the traffic, heat, crime, and pollution that seem to be all her hometown of Phoenix offers these days. True, packing up a house when you have an Ebay feedback score of more than 550 is a feat of Ironman-like determination and strength, but Maye is sure she and her husband Charlie's new life will be worth it. What she doesn't really factor in is how she might make friends in Spaulding. Relegated to the house, writing freelance while her husband settles in to his new position in the college's English Department, Maye finds her days stretching out before her in a haze of Lifetime television and donut binges. So Maye sets out to meet people—with decidedly less-than-stellar results.

Just when she's convinced she will die alone and friendless, Maye discovers the Sewer Pipe Queen pageant-a celebration of Spaulding's founder and his thriving sewer pipe factory. Determined to parlay a win at the pageant as her entrée into Spaulding society, Maye begins a quest to find Spaulding's most famous and beloved Queen to be her sponsor. And what she finds—besides a crazy lady with one eyebrow holed up in a shack on the outskirts of town—is the key to a sinister mystery that has hoovered over the town for years. Filled with Laurie Notaro's trademark raucous, bawdy humor, THERE'S A (SLIGHT) CHANCE I MIGHT BE GOING TO HELL is a rollicking romp of a tale and one wildly uproarious fiction debut.