Feel free to just skip ahead and read the story, but I’m briefly going to share a little Pedal Steel housekeeping, and just what I’ve been up to—it’s been since April that I last published here, a review of the novel IN THE DESERT by (buy her book!) and in March I published Pedal Steel’s inaugural Guest Fiction, a cut of prime Colorado grit lit by that I was just so fucking honored to publish. A completely wonderful story by an emerging writer from the rugged San Luis Valley who will not be unknown for long. But nothing much new of mine.

But I have been writing. In late June published a piece I wrote about Denis Johnson. I appreciate and what they’re doing over there, and I appreciate the reception that piece got. I’ve been writing for Wildsam, an American travel brand and magazine where I’m contributing somewhat regularly, and I finished a book review for one of the still-coolest literary journals on the planet (more on that in the fall). And I’m also well into a new novel, a follow-up to my debut Nightburner (which will be out next year, from Minotaur, the thriller/crime imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group).

I started this newsletter in early ‘25 and I’ve had a very exciting year since then. Grateful isn’t even generous enough of a word.

All to say: I haven’t been publishing regularly here because I’ve been busy. I’m also enjoying my summer. My kid just turned one. We’re camping, getting out on the river. I’m trying to get out fly fishing as much as possible, get a road trip going on days off. Summers aren’t good for spending a lot of time on a laptop, and I’ve got plenty of writing to do already. But I think you’ll enjoy this short story, and I’m stoked to publish it here, and encourage you to read it at FEIGN lit mag in its original form and check out that journal.

-BP

“Last dream I’d had that I liked,” Amy said in the dark, “I was doing a séance. And y’all were there.”

“Was it about Daniel?” Lyanna said. “Did we reach him?”

“You weren’t there.”

We sat at my poker table. Votive candles flickered in whiskey tumblers we’d drank from. Little fingers of candlelight slipped all over the empty Maker’s bottle. Then a greater flicker: the power came back on.

I went into the den, flipped the record onto Side Two, dropped the needle and adjusted the volume. If you’d turned it up too loud you couldn’t hear anybody talking. Too low and you couldn’t hear it at all for the godlike crashing of rain all around us. Wind actually smacked the house. Slapped it. I’d made a point of moving all the chairs, tables, loveseats, anywhere a body could sit, a safe distance from any window.

It was too bad: when I sat back down you still couldn’t hear it well enough, and we’d needed music on a night like tonight. Rigo had already started talking about his dream so as to snuff out any further discussion of Daniel between Amy and Lyanna. What about Corinna? I wondered. Corinna, my wife. Maybe it was Corinna Amy’d made a connection with. But that was only a dream, so what did it matter? For my handling of the turntable and wondering over Amy’s dream, I’d missed most of what Rigo had told us concerning his own—had missed essential details, tuned in too late, hearing only:

“…and everybody stood looking at me like I was crazy, having baptized the priest.”

“Wait,” I said. “Were you a baby holding him? A baby dunking a priest’s head in church?”

“Were you not listening to his story?”

This was Amy.

“We were in the river,” Rigo said. “Itchetucknee. We weren’t at church, Paul. There wasn’t any church in the dream. Just the priest.”

I asked him, “A river? Wouldn’t it have been a reverend?”

“I can’t go swimming anywhere around here,” Lyanna said. “Terrified of gators.”

Lyanna was from Minnesota. But she’d lived here ten years, staying after grad school. She really didn’t have an excuse anymore, all terrified of gators.

“It’s not a story,” Lyanna said.

No one knew what she was talking about. I reached for a tumbler of candlelight, spun it a few times, studied it like something precious.

“Amy was like, ‘Were you not listening to his story?’ at Paul, but if it’s a dream it’s not a story.”

“Well I’m just really sorry,” Amy said.

Thank god the front door flew open, Deena arriving, huddled into herself and bundled up darkly like a friar, bounding through the kitchen doorway in flight from the outer apocalyptic roar. The sheer commotion of a person entering a house in these conditions shoved violently at time, extinguishing any present possibility of Amy and Lyanna going at each other. Under hurricane nights things seemed to shift into fast-forward, like watching a time-lapse video. The power’s on. Now it’s off. On again. A window is a window. Now a window is a broken window. Or no window at all. A tree standing and now not. Someone’s alive. Now not. A bottle full and suddenly empty. No worries. Deena brought supplies.

Among these friends here, my house was always the last to lose power. And with far less risk of flooding to boot, farther inland and sitting atop a higher gradient, for what that’s worth in Florida. Maybe a hundred, a hundred-and-fifty feet higher, outside the city in a burg attended by sprawling, arthritic live oak and serrated saw palm prairie, some nearby sapphire-blue springs, and old tin-roofed houses patinated and rust-slashed beneath the crowns of towering elder palm trees.

Vestiges of a very pretty state are still strewn about.

Not necessarily safe here at my house—nowhere’s safe—yet the logical refuge for a hurricane party. We’d all gone to college together ten years ago at UF. For various reasons we didn’t get together that often anymore. But we always got together for a hurricane.

“We were talking about dreams we’ve had,” I said. “But they have to be good dreams. What’s the last good dream you had?”

“I really don’t have good ones,” Deena said.

“I hear that,” Lyanna said.

“Amy didn’t get to finish,” Rigo said. “About the séance. I interrupted you. Amy, I’m sorry I interrupted you.” Rigo had always liked Amy.

“You didn’t interrupt me,” Amy said. “I’d just stopped talking.”

“Cups?” Deena said. She peeled and unwound the red wax seal, uncorked the bottle, and slid it to the center of the table.

“Those’re all the glasses I’ve got for whiskey. But we can drink out of something else.”

It was true. Corrina and I had bought others together, some decorative crystal-sided tumblers. But there were certain things I’d just had to get rid of.

Amy blew out a candle, shucked it from the glass, set it on the table and poured whiskey in. She blew out the rest of the candles. “What do we need these for now, anyway?” She fixed everyone a drink.

“Mine has a little wax in it,” Rigo said.

“They’re not cups,” Lyanna said. “Deena said cups. They’re called glasses. Cups are for children.”

Much of the time folks simply failed to understand Lyanna’s humor.

There was a smell of blown-out candles. The lights in the kitchen flickered. What you could hear of the music chiming in from the living room ceased entirely. The lights flickered again. We sat together drinking in darkness.

I’d had these stemless wine glasses the color of lapis and now Amy lighted within them the flashing votives and a terrific blue ballet of light pulsed amid the five of us sitting here, and I started talking about my dreams.

After Corinna had slipped on the transom of her friend’s ski-boat, her head hitting the swim platform and her body woodenly turning and disappearing into the bay, found flung against the rocky shore later that evening, all happening while I was away at an outdoor retail expo in Atlanta—I’m an editor-at-large for a decent sporting magazine—I’d predictably suffered some pretty bad dreams involving water. Typically concerning my drowning, Corrina nowhere to be seen. In my experience, dreams are largely selfish, or at the very least over-concerned with the self. But these dreams were extremely unpleasant, what with all the water. However, I’ve always, since childhood, been prone to good dreams. And these were the dreams about which I’d talked tonight.

In the recurring one I spoke of, I was an old-timey radio DJ whose sidekick was an otter who lived in a big bucket of water perched atop the seat beside me, but the otter didn’t talk like I’d wished it would, and therefore I ran the show. Into the studio’s lone microphone I intoned cartoonish whoops, zings, zaps, and other lively sounds. I even utilized an airhorn. At the end of the day, this is what emerged from my darkest recesses.

“Sounds like your heaven,” Rigo said. “But Amy, we’ve still got to hear about this séance.”

“Not into it,” Amy said. “I’ve lost interest in my own dream. I’d really just rather not remember any of them. Even the good ones. You just wake up thinking, You can’t be serious. It can completely fuck up your day.”

“I have an idea,” Deena said. “Looks like we’re sitting at a séance now.”

“Deena really has a corner on séances,” Lyanna said.

It was true. Deena was the one in school who’d told us absolutely everything about our astrological situations and all the messages sent down upon us from stars and planets. When we’d get together at her place, she’d always whip out the Tarot deck after a certain amount of drinks. Deena sitting here in her long, purple silk scarf and fingernails painted black. She’d taught community ed classes on the paranormal at Santa Fe College. Even dabbled in ghost-hunting, whatever that means. If anyone here knew anything about séances, it was Deena.

“Might as well have fun,” Deena said.

“God, please, no,” Amy said.

“Debbie Downer,” Lyanna said.

“Go easy,” Rigo said.

“I wish you’d all quit,” I said, which gave everyone a start. I’d just needed some air, but you couldn’t really get any now.

All the same I went out onto the screened back deck and the plunging, screaming rain sifted itself into an irritating mist through the fine mesh wire. But still, it was pretty all right here, just taking a beat. The back door clapped and Lyanna stood next to me with one arm hugging herself and the other fishing a cigarette out of her purse.

She lit up, and I told her, “Right now’s when it’s really, really hard for me not to do that anymore.”

“Fifty percent of why we smoke,” she said, “is getting away from people at parties.”

“I wouldn’t call this a party.”

“Well, we’re missing two people.”

“Was this weird of me?” I said.

Looking out beyond my backyard was like staring at a broken TV screen with the lights turned off in my eyeballs. I took a single drag off her cigarette. First taste I’d tasted in years.

“Did it make you feel less weird when I came out here too?”

“I’ll have just one more,” I said, and inhaled deeply as the tall palms swung around out there like rubber trees. And then nothing beyond that but the curtain of screaming rain.

The worst thing about a hurricane isn’t the damage caused or the death toll. It’s that it robs you of the sensations achieved via the common storm. The dramatic percussion of thunder and incandescent wink of lightning like a flash photo benediction. Now I shared these thoughts with Lyanna, and she just shook her head in a way that told me I hadn’t changed since the day she’d met me. She stubbed her cigarette out in the parched soil of a potted succulent. I followed her inside. There was the thing with her and Daniel. But there was also the one night with me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that as we sat back down at the table with everybody, Deena assembling more candles for the séance.

“I found these damn candles,” Deena said. “But you should really organize your shit.”

I’d had all sorts of dying things in my refrigerator. A crisper drawer museum of the wilted. I told Deena I thought I had some sage. Because didn’t you burn sage before something like a séance?

“Sage is really no good, hon,” Deena said.

She then continued to allege with high vehemence the farce that was sage regarding the cleansing of spaces. Of purification preceding rites. She’d expressed a staunch advocacy for cedar wood in these situations yet had brought none, unsurprisingly. Not even Deena could’ve predicted tonight.

Father Rojas, free-spirited priest at my and Corrina’s church, had given me some wonderfully fragrant palo santo after her passing, but I’d burned it all up as a bathroom freshener.

And I’ve since stopped going to church. Since stopped returning Rojas’s calls.

Deena swept her black-painted fingertips, drawing the sign of the cross in airy pantomime over different parts of the house—most notably the lone window in the space adjacent to ours: the kitchen, the above-the-sink-window. In front of this window, a stained glass peacock dangled from a hook, its technicolor plumage crystallized by the falling rain. One of the things of hers I’d kept.

“First off,” Deena said, “I want you all to know that I, like, get it.”

Her glare oscillated between Amy and me.

“Like I said, we can just have fun here, if we want to. It’s best anyway not to call on anybody specific, especially when something’s fresh, okay?”

Mine was the fresher. Daniel passed two years ago, likewise in a violent accident. Daniel had had trouble with alcohol and horseshoed his truck and therefore himself and his entire life around a light pole off Four Forty-One. He’d been bendering at a painter friend’s place in Micanopy one weekend when he and Amy were on the outs. For the third time, they’d broken their engagement. Presently I did not believe in contacting those of the other realm, or at least I’d convinced myself as much in this moment. Yet I’d hoped that if anyone’s spirit did emerge it would be Corrina’s. Not because I wanted that to happen, but because I didn’t wish for anymore mounting sadness on Amy. Sure, Corrina and I’d been married. Sure, Corrina died six months ago—to Daniel’s two years. Mine was the fresher. But Amy’d been living with it longer, and certain things have to count for something.

“To our ancestors,” Rigo said, “we ask that you join us here tonight and we call upon you as allies, friends, neighbors, lovers—”

“Okay, good job Rigo,” Deena said.

“That felt so cool,” Rigo said.

“The apparatus is glowing.”

The whiskey bottle, two-thirds drank now, stood amid a cluster of free-standing candles and the blue-glowing ones in wine glasses. It created an effect. Deena had done a pretty damn good job.

“I feel like we should’ve used the empty bottle,” Amy said, “as the apparatus.”

“Ultimately,” Deena said, “they’ll choose.”

The candlelight swelled, the poker table ignited with its power. Outside, the wind careened wildly and the house lights flashed on and off like the flare of lightning, during which time the record must’ve turned an inch or so—and you could hear it, a single second of sitar drone. Side Two of Revolver.

But now the candlelight dimmed again and all was very dark, and maybe this was some gross gaucherie of mediumship but I’d poured myself a drink from our apparatus of divination. Everyone else passed it around too, Deena’s eyes shut, calling out, “Can you give us a signal? Can you give us a signal? Do you want us to know who you are? If you’d like for us to know who you are, give us a signal.”

Rigo, with great cheerfulness in his heart, cried out, “Make the power go on and off again.”

“Seems like a lot to ask,” Lyanna said. “Maybe just blow out a candle?”

“You’re all jumping ahead,” Deena told us.

I’d been distracted, ever since Deena had blessed that window above the sink. Our singular vantage of the outer chaos, the crazed rain, the baying wind which seemed to coil about the house and writhe monstrously.

Again the stained glass peacock turned, its dazzling feathers glimmering by this almost sculpture-like mass of candles. Again the power returned. Music filling the room and much louder this time than the weather, the backwards guitar licks and distressed seagull-sounds of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and now the scratch of the record ceasing its turning. Dark again.

“There’s someone here,” Lyanna said, almost weeping. “A presence.”

“You’re jumping ahead,” Deena warned her.

“Well it isn’t anyone in here,” I said, tilting the bottle. I’d needed ice, and I got up and opened the freezer and fetched a tray. “It’s starting to melt.” I sat back down and drank it neat.

“Like, one fucking time,” Amy said.

“Three,” Lyanna said.

“Shut up.”

“All of you,” Deena said. “All of you need to shut up.”

Deena, her eyes hard-shut and wrinkled, formed her hands into twin pistol-shapes and pressed her pointers into her temples, summoning some distant memory.

The power fluttered on and off, strobelike. Dark again.

“I think it’s him,” Lyanna said.

“Not good,” Rigo said. “Not good.”

Amy got up and shouted, “You crazy fucking bitch.”

The window above the sink exploded. A mammoth, almost unbelievable crashing, and the wind sucking itself inside and peeling away the magnetized contents off the face of my refrigerator: photos of my nieces and nephews, wedding invitations, take-out menus. I raced to the pantry and tore away a large, orange trash bag, one with a jack-o-lantern’s face like you’d use storing leaves in autumn. Not necessary here in north Florida, but the Dream Disc Jockey in me likes a trash bag with a face.

Moments later, Deena held the thing against the window frame, fighting against the screaming flurry, the piercing rain streaming in. I secured the bag with a staple gun. Then we fastened three, four more trash bags. I was reminded of a less fortunate time in my life, much younger than I am now, in which I’d had no choice but to utilize this method on a car—but with duct tape. Same smiling bag. Now the jack-o-lantern’s face rippled and slapped horribly, undulating as though it were laughing at us. Throughout this frenzied undertaking I’d many times kicked at some strange obstruction, some figure getting in my way: on the kitchen floor lay an incredibly tiny, petrified man with a pointy beard, a pointy hat.

After I’d had a chance to stand idly, to breathe, to think—

My neighbors, the O’Learys, a friendly yet reclusive couple in their seventies, had over many decades decorated their yard with such an ensemble of lawn ornaments it produced an absurd, almost carnival-like affect. Tonight the hurricane had raised a garden gnome heavenward, hurled it through my kitchen window.

I would’ve barely noticed the power coming back on if it hadn’t been for The Beatles, and in what I’d perceived was in good taste I hurried into the den and raised the needle and turned the whole system off. Lyanna was out smoking again. Deena had pulled an Irish exit. I’d give her a call and make sure she got home all right. I started sweeping big daggers of glass off the kitchen floor and, under the spell of some brief whimsy that’s so precious and holy to me, I thought: what a perfect setting for a séance, mid-hurricane. The power flaring on again, off again, the terror of rain and the wind’s supernatural hymn—it’s like hosting your own little haunted attraction. Amy was sitting at the poker table by Rigo. She’d been crying. She held Rigo’s hand. She’d been holding his hand for how long I don’t know.

Lyanna came inside and we all just sat for a time in silence. Amy started blowing out all the candles.

“That was stupid,” Lyanna said. “Stupid of Deena.”

“You all know the drill,” I said. “No driving, please.”

The wall clock said one AM. Everyone knew where to find a place to sleep here, and it had occurred to me that this might be the last time they do. More and more as each year passes I think, This could be the last time.

I laid a quilt over the couch for myself and turned on the stereo system. Some quiet listening to lull me to sleep. As the other three started upstairs, Lyanna, to whom I’d lent my bed, trailed behind and turned and gave me a sort of look, and I thought: Okay. Maybe. Even the meanest among us needs somebody to lie with.

Deena had mentioned something earlier about following a séance with corporeal activity, to shake it all out with motion, what with all that sitting still and engrossing one’s self with reaching at what’s beyond. But before I’d made any kind of decision I needed to go back outside for some of that sweet hurricane air on the screened back deck, whereupon I pinched Lyanna’s cigarette butt out of the succulent soil and lit up, gazing upon my backyard all harried by the monster of weather. The soaking grass and giant ferns and flowers thrashing about, a long row of tall palm trees bent like archers’ bows, and the mammoth live oaks squatting upon the horizon, trembling undercover of pitiless night. Corrina’s stained glass peacock lay out here in the grass, darkly iridescent, and I thought I might, someday soon when the sky clears, stand it upright in some way or another, and the garden gnome who’d so grandly entered my life could join the peacock, and I’d continue assembling others in my backyard. A pumpkin face, a baby baptizing a priest, a talking otter. In competition, or perhaps kinship, with my neighbors across the way.

Buy Me A Beer

There’s a particular genre of American art that shines a slatted light across the loneliest places in this ever-vast country, spaces in which humans are inseparable from the natural world. Paris, Texas, The Searchers, Badlands, Wild at Heart, No Country for Old Men. It’s trickier to capture in books. And now more rarely achieved, as our national collective seems increasingly concerned over the encroaching maw of modernity: techy novels and dystopias; the ubiquitous big city novel; the internet novel; autofiction in which narrators squirm amid the confines of their own limited experience; characters moving about a world in which physical and digital realms appear fused.

The short stories of Richard Ford and Thomas McGuane, the novels of Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy—this may be a dying art form. Unless Taylor Sheridan does the trick for you. Many authors have become detached from landscapes and places. Strange to think so, if one travels across the United States with a keen eye. It’s all still there, and the people too.

Author has traveled the American Southwestern deserts and plains. She’s lived in Ireland now for more than twenty-five years, long enough removed that her vision of America closely resembles that of the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who directed Paris, Texas and roamed the Southwest, photographing the region’s raw, wind-bitten chasms and isolated filling stations and still-standing neon mid-century motor lodges and diners. Maybe you need a little distance to realize that much of America looks unchanged from fifty or more years ago: towns trapped in time-bubbles and folks shuttling about in the liminal, the celestial, the places where time moves at a crawl.

Byar’s debut novel In the Desert (Cowboy Jamboree Press), published in March of 2026, largely takes place in—well, maybe the title gives it away. Raphael, a down-on-his-luck Hollywood actor, first appears steeped in drink and contemplating suicide in a dumpy SoCal bedroom. Back in his desert hometown, Jessie, the love of his life, is a single mother running a truck stop.

Byar smartly arranges the town as would a set designer for a play, keeping things minimal at the start: we’re mostly looking at an archetypal crossroads town in the middle of nowhere. Truck stop, diner, motel. Or, as Byar puts it, a “small oasis of something in the middle of nothing.” Violence and nasty weather can emerge like a thunderclap, and there’s nowhere else to go.

Byar allows space across the panoramic backdrop so the reader can behold the desert—suffocating in its vastness—without even straining to look, and this imbues the narrative with cinematic textures that can, if in the wrong author’s hands, get in the way of the story.

Even so, Byar doesn’t settle for traditional narrative movement. By the time the story’s inciting incident occurs—a sudden, guns-blazing assault in the diner, involving a baddie resembling the demonic biker from Raising Arizona—the author quickly lets the reader know we’re not driving down a staightaway. Early on, we get a full school essay—call it a chapter—written by Jessie’s nine-year-old son, Ryan, on the End of Days.

The threat of climate change and natural disasters looms large over the world Byar has created, which could be in the present, the past, or the future. It doesn’t really matter, as our author operates under the Faulknerian notion that time is a whirlpool and the past isn’t even past.

In Byar’s desert, narrative oscillates between the past, the present, and the cosmic. It’s a desert of mirages, mysterious carnivals with the “BEST GAMES IN TWENTY-FIVE GALAXIES!” and magic mirrors and abandoned ships atop dried up lakes and tales of talking leopards and a lone phone booth-as-portal.

The literary genre-bender has, in our era, loomed ever larger, traditional realism taking up less real estate on your local bookstore’s front table display. Makes perfect sense. Many decades have passed in which people have adopted a more polyamorous cultural diet. Since the days of Modernism and mid-century realism, we’ve gotten rock’n’roll, heavy metal, synth pop, and on into et cetera; Hollywood blockbusters and comic book movies; streaming, the internet; and landmark works of SciFi, Fantasy, and Horror. It’s helpful to remember that Faulkner probably didn’t even own a television until his sixties, if he ever owned one at all.

In the Desert manages to fuse genre with the bucolic in fresh ways. It’s Cosmic American Magical Realism, or a kind of gonzo gritty Southwestern Fantasy. The shifts between past and present, the magical and the real, and multiple points of view (all mercifully told in third-person) will frustrate a reader looking for a clean beginning, middle, and end. But Byar has a steady command over her prose. This tends to keep the sauce from breaking. She sticks to sharp sentences with a clipped, colloquial, sometimes profane edge: “Thank fuck it turned out only her legs were fucked cause at least she could kill herself if it came to it.”

The prose can often feel a little too fuck-y. This can start to get irksome from a third-person narrator. Irish author Kevin Barry’s 2024 bestseller The Heart In Winter, also a love story set in the American West (and charming overall), treats a quick fuck at the end of a paragraph as a get-a-laugh-out-of-the-reader-for-free card. Byar isn’t that egregious, and a narrator with a sense of humor and a sailor’s tongue beats a writer who takes their darker material too seriously. Irreverence in the writer, relief for the reader

She consistently writes poetic descriptions, but the images are clear: ceiling fans are “nicotine-lacquered” and bar tops are “bottle-bruised.” Such a kaleidoscopic, genre-bending novel could easily drown in clumsy metaphors and yawny digressions in the wrong hands, but Byar knows how to ground the reader immediately in her scenes and keep the whole thing boredom-proof. And she’s not afraid to let it get dark and then darker still. Later in the novel—Raphael in pursuit of his old flame and much backstory out of the way—Jessie’s circling the drain into hell.

She moves around, mostly to outrun pimps looking to add her to their stable, the law looking for a cut, and the cunts looking to beat up a whore. No matter what motel, she stays in the same room number each time. Figures it’s her lucky charm as she’s not dead yet. Room thirty-three reminds her of Raphael who she tries not to think of when some gorilla with bad breath and a worse attitude is on top of her telling her to cum, you stupid bitch.

You have to appreciate the john’s “worse attitude” here, irreverence being one of Byar’s powers. What brought Jessie to this point is for the reader to find out, and you might feel as though this is when the book really starts moving. As inventive as its structure is, the best stretches of writing here are when we’re firmly seated in the story’s present action, when things are just cruising. Byar can really move a character into action with clear, strong verbs and spatial awareness:

Her nails splinter as she tries to get purchase. Fails. She rummages through a nearby bench for a knife and finds a hacksaw. It will have to do. Panic and need locomote her arm back and forth, and she’s through the rope in no time. Raphael crumbles into her arms.

There is nothing easy about this. Expressive, sense-popping verbs punctuated by low-calorie interiority (“It will have to do”)—interiority that’s there but brief enough not to disrupt movement. The originality of “locomote.” The oddly clean description of a body that “crumbles” into one’s arms.

Miss Byar has the chops to take the archetypal America of wide open spaces into cosmic territory, in whatever whacky structure she chooses, simply because she’s done the work. She’s a mother of two—and In the Desert is her first book—and one gets the sense that she’s spent years behind the keyboard biding her time, honing her craft, keeping it close to the chest until it’s ready. Writers, take note. Readers? Take pleasure. This one’s for you, because the author made sure of that.

With In the Desert, Byar gives us an American Gothic, a welcome throwback to the flyover state grit lit of the 1980s, and a psychedelic odyssey of fresh narrative forms mirroring our present berserk, time-is-a-flat-circle era. And the sentences, yes, the sentences. If you choose to go on this carnival ride, it’s nice to know the operator’s sober and knows the machinery.

Thanks for tuning in to Pedal Steel. If you’d like to order Barbara’s book, do so here via Amazon or here. You can also follow or subscribe to Barbara Byar on Substack. Check out her publisher, Cowboy Jamboree Press, and support indie presses. If you appreciate book reviews in which the writer never uses the word “I,” consider subscribing to Pedal Steel.

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Thanks for tuning in to PEDAL STEEL. A few months ago I got a story sent to me cold, by a man named , a writer based in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. I opened the document and started reading and then I couldn’t stop. This is the kind of story I’d hoped to place here, the kind of thing that makes PEDAL STEEL less of a Brett Writes Things project and more of a venue for discovery and collaboration.

“Dog Bite” is the inaugural piece of Guest Fiction for PEDAL STEEL. It’s about fatherhood, addiction, and a criminal temper. It’s about that animal that searches in darkness, that bites hold of you and won’t let go.

This is Real Deal Rural Noir on the Colorado plains by a writer who knows how to tell a story that feels true, and how to deliver that truth, sentence by sentence.

- Brett

I first noticed it about a week before school started. I took the girls to watch Alamosa High versus some school running the wishbone from north of the valley. We only went because Stevie’s kid made the roster as a freshman. And by made I mean the coaches had trouble filling out the 53 and they stuck him on the bench. Third string corner used only in the nickel. Still, Stevie’s kid is like a nephew to me, a cousin to the girls. That kind of thing is important.

Bella really didn’t want to go.

She’d been like this lately. I couldn’t remember if it started before or after Heather left, but losing your mom to the streets, pockmarks on her face, couldn’t have helped any. Her little sister and I sat in the truck while Bella pitched a fit just outside the front door. With the truck running, she forced me to pry her hands from the door handle and carry her like a deflated football into the pickup. We didn’t talk on the seven-minute drive to the high school, just watched the valley’s last slanted light spewing from Monte Vista over rows of rented alfalfa. She didn’t turn on the radio. Sophie in a car seat in the back plugged into a kid’s iPad, too young to feel the pain of feeling left out.

I noticed first how Bella sat on the bleachers. Slumped over. Knees into her chest. Hands clasped around her shins. Like she was burrowing into herself. Waiting for the sun to go down. Waiting for the game to be over. Waiting for high school to be over. It would be a while. She was only a freshman.

Stevie was Heather’s ex from twenty years ago who spent his college years outside of Boston. Black hair pulled tight into a little bun, two-day beard, and a jaw line that used to get him places he didn’t belong. Now he wore a Mean Moose hoody with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, jeans and work boots. We didn’t talk about Heather. Nobody did. But he was family just the same, and he was so excited for his boy to make the team. I never pointed out that anybody could have made the team this year. They didn’t have enough bodies. Stevie snuck two Styrofoam loaf-and-jug cups full of rodeo juice—lemonade and cheap vodka—into the stands. I sipped mine slowly. Out of habit. To be nice.

“There he is,” Stevie shouted from the top bleacher. The setting sun so bright off the aluminum bleachers I couldn’t see my nephew down there warming up. “Hit somebody, boy! Hit ‘em!”

Stevie sat down. Sophie wore a tutu every day since her mother left. The stains were starting to be obvious. She climbed on Stevie’s neck like a little happy monkey.

“They’re just warming up,” I said. “You’re not supposed to hit anybody during warmups.”

“Got to make the most out of your opportunity,” Stevie said to me and sucked the rodeo juice through his teeth. “He ain’t making the field anytime soon.” Then he stood and slugged his drink and yelled to the field, “That-a-boy, hit somebody, tonight!”

A few parents turned and stared. Nephew Billy looked like a kid trying on his dad’s suit there on the forty doing a runner’s lunge. Even through his helmet, we could see he was embarrassed, giving his dad a don’t-make-me-look dumb pleading gaze. Stevie sat down and waved his hand toward the field.

“He’s a good kid,” I said.

“Too small to get in the game,” he said. “Probably for the best, they’d kill him out there. But I grew four inches when I was a sophomore. Maybe next year will be his time, eh?”

“He’ll grow,” I said. And nephew Billy tripped on his untied cleats running to the sidelines.

I laughed and bumped a shoulder into Bella curled up beside me. She didn’t even look up from her shoelaces. Lost somewhere unseen.

I took another swig of the rodeo juice. This one for real, and I realized I needed to stop right there if I was going to drive the girls home. I set the cup between my feet. Bella’s laces were untied too.

Down the row of bleachers, a gaggle of teenage girls. None of them as pretty as Bella. They snickered and sneered and passed a vape pen around, trying to be sneaky, but it was obvious to anyone who cared to watch them. They caught me staring, and I flipped back to the field where nephew Billy now sat on the bench, unsure if he should join the team’s pregame huddle at the fifty. Stevie shooing him from up here, Billy never turning back.

The girls laughed, and one pointed this way. Bella shot up a shy hand, like a little salute almost. They laughed harder, and a few of them copied her gesture. Bella sunk more into herself.

“You know them?” I asked. Eyes to the coin toss.

“They’re nobody,” she said.

Bella didn’t say a thing on the ride home.

I got that first call at work. I’m a glazier. Been at Walker Glass thirteen years now. I was on my way to a house call, some rich couple with no kids wanted a dog door on the north side of town. I’d been out there three times already.

“Dad,” her voice so low through the phone, I took the call out the shop’s back door. The morning sun over Mount Blanca blinding.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve been bit. They say I need to go to the hospital.”

“Something bit you?” The noise of the shop through the open garage door. I pressed the cordless firm against my ear and plugged the other with my finger. “Did you say bit?”

“A dog bite.”

She sounded so embarrassed. Like it was her fault. Like somebody was judging her there in the room.

“At school?” I asked. “A dog at school bit you?”

“The Vegas’ dog,” she said. “Out at the bus stop.”

I have a temper. I know that. Heather knew that. I try to hide it from the girls the best I can, but when it comes, it comes. There is little I can do. I drove the company truck with two panels for the Boys and Girls Club project affixed to the rack in the back. You’re not supposed to do more than forty-five with panels that big. I hit seventy on the 5 North. Gravel spitting. A rooster tail of dust running from Walker’s place to the high school.

When I got there, Bella was all right, sitting in the nurse’s station with a bandage wrapped around her calf. That same sad-eyed stare from the bleachers sketched on her face. She looked so much like her mother.

“You okay, kid?” I said, crouched in a catcher’s stance. She wasn’t acting herself. I thought it was the nurse and the resource officer in the room, so I nodded for them to leave. They stepped out. “Bella, what happened?” I brushed her hair behind her ear.

“I had my headphones on,” she said, slumped on the exam table. That roll of paper crunched beneath her as she fussed with the bandage. “I didn’t hear it coming. When I got to the corner, it was already there. I thought it was just scared. Its head was down, and it was backing up. But it was growling. I tried to yell at it to leave, and then I saw the bus coming. I picked up some gravel off the road and threw it, but that just made the dog mean. It came at me, and I ran toward the bus. It bit me on the leg, then booked it the other way.”

“Are you hurt?”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Can we go home?”

She was looking down at my boots. “Yeah, let me—” I stood and searched my pockets for the company phone. I’d forgotten it. The dog door people expected me an hour ago. “You gonna be all right? I have to make a stop first.”

I signed her out for the day at the school’s security office, two down from the principal’s. Bella stood awkward by the doorway, part in the hall as the period bell rang and part in the office. I noticed —I should have noticed earlier —that she was wearing the same outfit she slept in at school. Oversized gray sweats, one leg rolled to her knee where the dog got her, a tank, and one of my old flannels left unbuttoned. Oversized headphones draped around her neck. Bella was an artist. I figured it was her look. But seeing her, there at the school, I saw things weren’t right. I finished signing her out and walked down the hall full of passing students.

Bella paced behind me a good ways back. Fine, I thought. Teenagers. I hated high school too.

That’s when I saw them again. The girls from the bleachers. One—a blonde—leaned up against a locker, smacking gum. The others around her like parishioners drawn to an idol. They stared through me, to Bella. I took another few steps and tried to turn my head slightly to see if she was still behind me. Then I stopped in a river of passing kids. There was Bella sulking, head down through the halls. The girls snapped to her. The blonde one said something to the group, and they all laughed. A sick, pathetic laughter. And when Bella passed them, the blonde one said, “Dirty bitch. I see why your mom left.”

I was at them before I realized I was at them.

I heard Bella first. She was begging for me to stop. Apologizing. Over and over. To them. She’s apologizing to them.

I stumbled back. Blood on my shirt, my company shirt. And then I was hit from behind. Face pressed against the cold scuffed linoleum. It smelled like the glue we use on auto glass. A knee on my neck. I saw the blonde girl. She was crying. Her head in her hands. A bloody nose. I spat and grunted, and they took me away.

I once spent two nights in jail. It should have only been a few hours, but it took that long for Heather to sober up, pick up the phone, and bring one hundred in cash to the kiosk. I almost divorced her right there in the sally-port. I probably should have.

This time, they booked me on felony possession of a weapon on school grounds—I had a glazier’s knife in my back pocket—and felony assault of an at-risk youth. Through the fog of anger, I remembered catching her in the face with an elbow. I didn’t mean to. I meant to tell her what I thought of her. I never meant to do a lot of things. Bella begged me to stop, to keep moving. All the girls laughing. I turned to Bella, and I caught the blonde one with an elbow. Now, I waited for my phone call. Stevie has enough to bond me in cash from his settlement check. It would be a lot more than a hundred. The guard said twenty-five grand. But it could be more after they call the district attorney. At least you get it back when the case closes. I won’t miss a court date. I’m not that kind of person.

I am the type to drink too much. That’s why they booked me the last time. Heather was hammered, got into some blow in the bathroom. Weekends Tavern. A sad little place across from the emergency room. She’d bummed a smoke off the bouncer. Her hand brushing his as she pulled one from his pack. He lit it for her. Her skinny body canting toward his in the cold night. She likes getting attention when she’s hammered. I watched this from the bar through frosted glass painted with turkeys, for Thanksgiving, I guessed. I threw down another shot and left out the back patio, started the truck, and headed home. They got me on the 12 South. Red and blues flashing just a few houses down from our driveway. I guess they were out there because my neighbor had lit a burn pile, and somebody called it in. They handcuffed me and everything. Took me in. I refused all their bullshit tests. Now, I sat in the same room fifteen years later. I swore the same scratches were etched on the wall. The same crazy people holed up in the segregation units. The same young jail deputies. I mean they were different ones. But they all looked the same. At least Stevie would bond me out. At least I wouldn’t have to wait so long.

I bonded before shift change. Stevie was there when the sally-port rolled open. He stood outside his idling truck—a new GMC with a great flat grill almost as tall as he is. Stevie smiled. The sky roiling.

“Get in, champ,” he said.

I pulled my cell phone and wallet, eight bucks and change, from a clear plastic bag and tossed the bag in the parking lot. It blew in the wind and caught in some chain link. It smelled like mud out there, like it just rained. It never rains here.

“I hear that girl went four rounds with Tyson on Netflix,” Stevie smirked. “Surprised you made it out of there alive.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I said and smacked him in the balls with the back of my hand and climbed in shotgun. He joined me and slammed his door shut. Willie’s Roadhouse on the radio so low you could hardly hear it.

When Stevie backed out of the lot, he said, “Dude, that hurt. You are a killer.”

We grabbed KFC for the girls on the way home. Nephew Billy at his mom’s house. Stevie went on and on about this probation officer he met on Tinder. He drove with a knee down the 12 South while trying to swipe through her profile. My mind was elsewhere. The sun went down a while ago. I needed a shower. My skin smelled like the jail. A smell that didn’t really ever come out. I took the bait and gawked at some of the probation officer’s photos.

The dog.

It had to be the dog. A mangy, big angry-looking thing whose eyes lit up green in the truck’s headlights. We were a few houses down from mine. Just past Vegas’ place. Almost to Bella’s bus stop.

“Stop here,” I said, and set the plastic bags of KFC onto the floor behind my seat.

Stevie gunned it faster. Reflexively. Maybe he was trying to protect me from my darker self. I whacked his arm. “Stevie, stop the fucking truck.”

Stevie pulled over, bouncing along the cracked shoulder and weeds. He threw on his flashers. It was getting pretty dark out there. Stevie told me not to get out of the truck, like he already knew what I was thinking. I didn’t care. When I stepped out of the cab, the wind picked up. The stars turning on for the night. Mount Blanca in the early evening was just another blob of space devoid of anything. But it was there. Somewhere.

Just like that dog. The Vegas’ dog.

“Gordon, get back in the truck,” Stevie told me, leaning toward the open passenger door. “Come on. No. Get back.”

I ignored him and made my way through knee-high weeds and prickers just off the highway. Nobody coming or going. Stevie got out of the truck and joined me there by the Vegas’ ranch fencing. Yellow lights flashing. He was trying to get me to go home. I put an index finger to my lips.

“Did you hear that?” I asked. Something growled out by the Vegas’ center pivot.

Bella’s bus stop up at the next intersection.

“Come on,” I said, pushing through the rough weeds. I removed my Carhartt jacket and laid it over the barbed wire’s top line, pushing it down so Stevie could climb over. He shook his head no.

“It’s out there,” I said. “Come on.”

Stevie looked to the idling truck, then back to me.

“I’m getting that dog whether you come or not,” I said.

“Fine, but you need something if it comes after you,” he said, and Stevie opened the tailgate. Illuminated by red brake lights and punctuated by the yellow flashers, Stevie pulled his kid’s thirty-two-inch aluminum bat. With the bat in his hand, Stevie finally looked to be enjoying himself and handed it to me as if he were a squire bestowing Excalibur. I laughed. Our Camelot the 12 South. Bella, our disgraced princess. And that dog. That fucking dog. It barked. Stevie noticed it too. I used the bat to lower the barbed wire to waist level. He stepped over, and I joined him.

The Vegas’ place was down a little ways from us. Its only light cast from the kitchen, the rest of the house dark and silent. We walked through the ruts made by the center pivot’s oversized rubber tires. Stevie fell in behind me. Bat in my hand. The wind bit cold. My ears ached out there. It barked louder as we made our way into the dark.

We reached the hanging sprinklers swaying in the night. Orion high on the horizon and hunting the dog star. Stevie asked if I heard anything. I shook my head no. I blinked, and the dog in the sky disappeared.

Flexing my grip around the bat, I spun and searched the field for the dog. What I’d do if I found it, I couldn’t say.

Then, a noise. Paws through dirt. Panting. Something coming this way.

I wasn’t sure.

I flipped around and called out, “Come on, mutt. You out there?”

We stood in the cold and waited. But I heard only wind.

Stevie spun back toward the Vegas’ house, his hands flayed off his sides. He was unarmed. Stevie stood in a stoop, fists like hammers, as if that might help. Like this dog wouldn’t rip him to pieces.

I cocked the bat and Stevie spooked.

I reared the bat, swinging blind at the night and catching wind.

It sounded like a bear, slobbering and grunting and moving at us. A dark flash in the night. Green eyes. I swung again, chopping and catching dirt. The dog was huge. Teeth. Eyes. Fur. Head down in a full sprint at Stevie. I lifted the bat and swung hard and lunged, catching my boots in the pivot rut. I fell forward, face to rock and sand and cut alfalfa. Stevie leapt to the hanging sprinkler head, lifting his feet off the ground, swinging back and forth and then settling to stillness.

The dog came skittering and chugging my way. I covered my head. It dove across the rut and kept going on and into the night towards the Vegas’ house.

Stevie lowered himself, swearing at my name. I used the bat to get back upright, tried to clean my face.

Stevie said, “You swing like a girl.”

We walked back to the truck.

I pick at that night from Weekends Tavern like a scab. Sometimes I try to push Heather from my mind, repeating, she’s gone, over and over. She’s gone. Other times, I can’t help myself. I let it crawl around my skull. Let it take over. I imagine all the ways she hurt me. Ways I never even knew at the time. Inventing her motivations. Inventing what she did with the bouncer. I know I shouldn’t. But I pick. I can’t help it.

Back at the house, Bella and Sophie sat on the floor in front of the TV. They were watching Love Is Blind Denver. Bella was teaching Sophie who to root for, who to hate on. How to be a girl. Bella braided Sophie’s hair. They didn’t even turn to us as we set the KFC on the kitchen counter. They both looked happy. They both seemed fine.

Stevie and I ate standing up. The girls didn’t ask about the mud on my face or Stevie’s ripped jacket. They ate in front of the TV. I told you I pick at that night from Weekends but that’s not entirely true. A scab comes off eventually. This thing’s more like an abscessed tooth. Something rotting inside. Something I have no control over. Stevie went on about the probation officer—Jenny was her name. Sophie caught on.

“Uncle Stevie, who’s Jenny?” she said, her eyes trained on the TV girls.

I picture Heather leaving the bar in split screen as I hurtle down the 12 South, too drunk to drive. She’s flirting and laughing and getting into his truck, leaning over as he drives through town. A hand on his leg. She turns the radio on. He says she’s crazy. She says he has no idea. I get arrested at Bella’s bus stop. I can see our driveway. Our floodlight sputters like it did back then. They get to his place. Dom. I see him around town. Now he works at the recycling plant. Stacks the cardboard with a forklift. He smiles when he sees me. I don’t think he knows Heather and I were together. I keep seeing it. Heather stumbling out of Dom’s truck, a hand in his back pocket, and then they disappear inside. This was sometime before Bella was born. I kept seeing it, although I didn’t want to, as Stevie went on and on.

The next morning. I was late for work. I was always late. Bella lounged languid on the couch. I prodded her to get dressed.

“I am dressed,” she said.

I made them both sack lunches. Peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat. I used the peanut butter smeared knife to make my point. “Don’t you want to wear something you didn’t sleep in?” I said.

Bella turned on the Bluetooth speaker. Too loud. I was going into overload. Slapping the sandwiches in a little plastic bag, then into that brown paper everybody remembers, and then some single-serve Lays. Sophie wandered out in her tutu again.

“Sophia, do you want to wear something different today?”

She plopped on the living room floor.

“No.”

I looked out the kitchen window, towards the Vegas’ place. The sky was a wispy pastel blue, amber light rising. There was no dog. Stevie left the bat by the front door. Bella wandered into the kitchen barefoot. Happy. Black hair in a messy bun. She was in my flannel again, opened the fridge, drank orange juice from the carton, put it back, and started telling me all about some concept album she was listening to. I guess that’s what was playing. Crowding out my thoughts. Making us all late. I looked to the center pivot out there in the rutted field of dirt, then back to Bella, who seemed to care more about this band than I had about anything in my entire life, and I thought about how much I loved her.

“You’re going to be late,” I said. “Take this bat with you to the bus stop.”

“I’m never going back,” she told me.

Sophie, on the floor with Legos, “Yeah, me neither.”

I called the Gingerbread House and said Sophie would stay home, called the school to ask about Bella transferring to online for a while. The lady who answered the phone said I had a protection order against the school and they’d only speak to Heather. I forgot to call the dog door couple. The shop called and chewed me out. “I’m sorry,” I said, and told them the kids were sick. That worked, and I made the girls help pack the truck with our recycling.

We made the plant just before ten. It’s on the Southside of town, surrounded by places Heather might be. If she’s still here at all. Unsorted cardboard and cans of Diet Coke and milk jugs and everything else stuffed in the back of the pickup. We lost some to the wind as we shot down the 12 South. Bella, Sophie, and me. All was good. Out beyond the farms, little bands of cottonwoods in the middle distance. As we rode by Vegas’ place, I searched for the dog. It wasn’t there.

Sophie liked to carry the plastic milk jugs over her head like they weighed one thousand pounds, and she was the strongest girl on earth. Who’s to say? But when she got to the dumpster, she whined until Bella gave her a boost, and then she tossed it in. They repeated this process one by one as if once they finished, I’d make them go back to school. This would take a while. I stood in the back of the truck bed, throwing cardboard into the shed when I saw him. Dom. He was in his city vest and hopped on a forklift, and it beeped as he backed up and then grabbed garbled stacks of recycling and disappeared into the packing plant. I tossed two and three boxes at a time. It was warm and I started to sweat. A dog barked from the neighborhood. Somewhere on Alamosa’s Southside. The girls had only moved three milk jugs. Maybe forty more to go. I sat on the tailgate and watched them. Bella laughing.

We drove to Sonic after winding through the neighborhood where I thought Heather might be. I imagined her crawling out of a trap house, feet dragging behind her, like a zombie. I feared she’d come for the girls. I blew through a stop sign and sped up toward State Street. Bella looked up from her phone and questioned my driving with an annoyed flick of her eyebrow. Her mother could do that too. I slowed down and made our way down State. We parked by the Rio Grande and ate burgers and drank milkshakes, and Bella tried explaining the band she’d been listening to to Sophie. She didn’t get it either.

I had a meeting with a public defender just after lunch. I gave Bella a twenty and asked if she’d take her sister to the Boys and Girls arcade on State. I watched them walk down the sidewalk, Bella holding her sister’s hand as they passed the bookstore’s plate glass window. She stopped and stared at something in the store and then kept on. Once they crossed the intersection, I met the lawyer. She was younger than I imagined. Sixteen years prison. That’s all I could remember. Sixteen years. I’m not going away for sixteen years. Do whatever you need to do, but that’s not possible. I’ll do anything else. But I’m not going to prison. The young lawyer seemed to understand, and that was that. Not much else to do. None of the police reports were ready. I’d see her again next month.

You ever see Orion’s Belt in the winter sky? I’m terrible at constellations, but that one’s obvious. When it climbs high, winter is coming. But when it falls just above the horizon, spring will be here soon. No matter how dark and cold the Valley feels, it’s coming. We learn about it at the Sand Dunes—Heather and me—when she’s pregnant with Bella. Some ranger crammed in a light brown uniform walks us out on the dunes at night. We normally don’t do things like this. But for some reason, we’re here. I can’t remember why. “The father’s fire,” the ranger says, pointing to Orion’s Belt slung low against the southern sky, “is always burning. Back when people traveled the Valley through cold nights and deep snow, and their fires burned low, embers scattered to the wind, Orion still burned. Even when their own fires died, pushed through darkness across the Valley floor, the Father’s Fire still burned.”

I like that. I could be that. I always remember that story.

Bella refused to go to school that whole week. I left her at home alone. I didn’t know what else to do. The guys at the shop and I were putting in a new windshield, special-ordered for an F-250 with all the bells and whistles. One of the new ones with all the sensors. It was a pain in the ass, you ask me, but I drove an ’03 Chevy, so what do I know. We got the glass on the lift, the shop’s back garage door open in the October sun, Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels” on the radio.

“Nope, we don’t want to be you,” the guy who makes everyone call him Chief said after every verse. He says he’s part Ute. Could be.

Chief moved the glass into place.

The other men sang along out of tune. Their voices breaking.

Chief said, “He’s quite the panocha, huh?”

I was laying a bead of urethane when Walker came out of his office. I didn’t look back, concentrating on lining up the adhesive, but I heard him shuffling into the shop despite the guys’ Petty rendition.

“Gordon, phone,” he said.

I was on a step stool, leaned over the truck’s open cab. The owner had candy wrappers and fast-food trash shoved in the door wells and the cup holders, farm dirt on the floorboards. Somebody was in there a lot. I finished the top line of adhesive and wiped an excessive dollop clean.

“Take a message,” I said, and started in on the driver’s side.

“It’s your kid,” Walker said. “She’s crying.”

I came off the step stool fast, leaving a run of urethane dripping onto the white truck frame. The guys groaned and watched me leave. Walker instructed Chief to finish the adhesive, and I’m in the office.

“Bella, what’s wrong?”

“Mom’s here.”

I punched the Chevy faster and cut the turn onto the 12 South through the Abbey’s dormant rose bushes and flew towards home, gaining speed, all the while terrified. But if I’m honest, there was a part of me that hoped she was okay. Maybe she was better. Maybe she came home. Maybe she’d be Mom again. Then I drove mad. Fuck her. I pulled into our gravel lot and skidded a cloud, threw it in Park and got out of the truck. I called for Bella.

Heather’s there. She’s there in the kitchen.

I gripped the front door frame. Her hair first, from behind. She’s home. I see Bella eating pancakes at three years old, bluelillies she cries, bluelillies, and I see when we first bring Sophie home in that tiny little car seat and the time we finish the downstairs bathroom ourselves and the toilet leaks onto the floorboards and I see Dom in his yellow vest down at the recycling plant, those cold steel bars closing in, and I see the dog at the bus stop, and tubes for tying off a vein and burnt foil and little bags stamped with stars and missing money and missing nights and I could, I could. I couldn’t. I don’t do anything. But I stare.

Heather’s rifling through kitchen drawers as if she’s a bear up by Cat Creek in late fall and some hunter had left food in his fifth wheel. She clangs forks and knives and tosses the one drawer full of receipts and old batteries and whatever else, and then she’s down below the sink pulling out reusable grocery bags. She mutters to herself. I almost ask her what she’s doing, but nothing comes out when I notice Bella standing there. She’s in front of the TV. It’s still playing some reality dating show with the volume muted. Bella isn’t crying exactly. No, she’s alert and concerned. Eyes to her mother.

“Heather,” I say and step to her. “What are you doing here? Heather, stop.”

I come up behind her, and she spooks. She turns from a drawer where we keep the pots and pans and tops that never seem to fit any of them. She’s making a racket, clanging and banging, then freezes. An immediate silence screams. She looks up at me. I’m not even there.

She goes right back to it.

“Heather, please,” I say. “What do you need? You’re scaring Bella.”

“Mommy, stop,” Bella says. She’s crying now.

I drop to one knee, get hold of Heather’s wrist, and she pulls away. I wrench harder and stand. She comes with me, and her feet give out. She slips, but I hold her up. I start dragging her to the front door and she looks back at Bella, who’s stopped crying and takes a few steps our way.

I tell Heather she has to go. She straightens up and moves for the open door but she turns back. Her eyes a deep black. The starless void Mt. Blanca gathers from the sky at dawn. She looks at Bella.

“It’s here,” Heather says. “It’s here somewhere.”

It’s quiet again. I tell Bella how sorry I am, like it’s my fault. It is my fault. It’s our fault, her mother and me. It’s nobody’s fault. It doesn’t matter now, and I hold her and repeat I’m sorry. And Bella says it’s okay.

We hear a dog bark.

I move to the front door. It’s got three-quarter tempered glass.

Heather is running through the field. The dog closing in.

That next morning, I don’t even wake up the girls. I text Walker and say I need the day, something about not feeling well. He’d understand. When I come out of my room, Bella and Sophie are eating cereal and watching Love is Blind. I join them on a kitchen stool and pour myself a bowl. I watch for a while. Bella is wearing the same gray sweats, my old flannel, big headphones around her neck. I ask her where she’s going. Mouth full, milk spilling from my lips.

“School,” she says. She rolls her eyes like her mother. Sophie jumps from the couch to a pile of pillows on the floor.

Bella takes the bat by the front door and leaves. I set the bowl on the counter and watch.

The bat dragging behind her as she makes her way to the bus stop.

is a writer based in Colorado's San Luis Valley. For the past ten years, he's also represented the Valley's indigent criminal defendants as a public defender. Jimy graduated from both CU-Boulder's journalism and law schools, while completing the Denver-based Lighthouse Writers Workshop's Book Project in 2022 under the mentorship of crime writer Benjamin Whitmer. As a defense attorney in the San Luis Valley, Jimy has stood witness to every horrific act one human being can inflict on another, but he's seen beauty there, too. His work is a dispatch from the Valley floor, celebrating its people and its wide, empty skies.

Writing fiction is hard work. If you enjoyed “Dog Bite,” let Jimy know by hitting the heart button. Leave a comment. If you’re not already a subscriber to PEDAL STEEL, come on in. The water’s fine.

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I think a lot about rhythm. I was playing music well before I’d had any interest in reading and writing, down-picking drop-D riffs on a Mexican Fender Fat Strat in my room at sixteen, seventeen, every day, pages torn out of Guitar World magazine, glossies of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Slipknot’s Corey Taylor taped to my wall. A large red flag hung above my headboard, one with the great white Deftones pony.

In college I fell in love with the Rolling Stones, hearing Beggar’s Banquet through Exile On Main Street start to finish for the first time. This opened the door to classic country and Delta Blues. A Wilco phase led the way to Big Star. Big Star led to the Flamin’ Groovies and The dB’s and The Raspberries. My teenage obsession with Three Six Mafia eventually led to MF Doom and GZA’s Liquid Swords. I dug deeper.

An obsession with Dylan led to his early 2000s Americana masterpieces Love and Theft and Modern Times and from here I discovered Charley Patton and Skip James and Slim Harpo and Geeshee Wiley and Blind Willie Johnson and … and … that’s enough. Where are we going here? Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery, McCarthy, William Gay, Denis Johnson—these obsessions emerged in tandem with a heightened music literacy as I came of age. I decided I wanted to be a writer, and to keep music off to the side, a hobby.

A lot of people in my MFA cohort were great players. I don’t know how I got that lucky. There was my buddy Billy, a touring musician before he’d entered the fiction program. We formed a Tom Petty cover band called Petty Bullshit and played readings and shows at the VFW in Missoula, Montana. Nick Bosworth, a poet, could’ve been a session player in Nashville, that’s how good he was on guitar. Rachel sang like a ragged angel in a smoke-filled speakeasy. Brian could handle the keys like Benmont Tench. There were at least a dozen talented musicians across both cohorts in a two-year program, and some of our professors, even, were incredible players. Kevin Canty could howl the blues, and his brother is or was the drummer of Fugazi. David Gates could handle a pedal steel, had two vintage Teles and a Princeton Reverb and an eighty-year-old Gibson parlor guitar—mother of pearl fretboard—at his house. I visited him one time up at the Bennington Writing Seminars in Vermont and watched him on stage with New Yorker critic James Wood—who played drums if I recall correctly—and Southern Gothic novelist Lee Clay Johnson on stand-up bass. A lot of good writers I’ve met over the years, music seemed to be their first love. During my early writing life, music was everywhere.

And it’s everywhere in the best English language prose I’ve encountered. Good storytelling ignites the senses with clear, surprising imagery and an engagement with smell, touch, taste, sound—but also with the sounds of the words themselves. A writer is a musician even if they’ve never played an instrument.

This may sound trite if you’ve been in the game of writing prose or poetry for some time, but there might be some younger writers online here just starting out. So it’s useful to remind people how important it is to pay attention to sentence rhythm. After all, I don’t think I would’ve cared much for literature, or had started caring when I did, if there wasn’t a musicality to language in novels. This is something I never noticed in literature until I discovered the books that made me want to be a writer. Like a lot of youngsters, Hemingway really helped start it for me.

We’re gonna look at some seemingly unremarkable sentences in the opening of one of Hemingway’s early stories, “Indian Camp”:

Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George.

The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oarlocks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes.

The imagery is very stark and very clear. This is classic, standard issue Hemingway. Read the sentences out loud.

There’s some kind of—what do you call it?—pentameter here, a rhythm to “Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat..”

“Ba-da-da-dada-dadada-dadada-da-dah!” Or some shit like that. Much has been said about Hemingway’s stripped-down, simple diction and its influence on American literature is still felt a hundred years on. It did him a lot of favors with rhythm.

“The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes.” Well, that sounds pretty, what? Quick and choppy!

Did he mean to do that? I’d like to think so.

Another writer who stunned me as I came of age was Cormac McCarthy, and the first book I read of his was All The Pretty Horses. In the opening pages, John Grady Cole regards his grandfather dead in an open casket and steps outside into the Western evening to behold a train moving into the night:

It came boring out of the east like a ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone.

Yikes. There might be too much for me to unpack here. Read it out loud.

It’s a hell of a long sentence, a sort of bridge between Hemingway and Faulkner, two of McCarthy’s most obvious literary forebears: the long expressive meanderings stacked with almost impressionistic imagery and yet McCarthy largely chooses hard, plainspoken language and verbs like “coming” and “howling” and “running” and “bellowing” and “sucking” and “lagging,” frequently using present participles to create a potent momentum to the sentence, allowing it to barrel forth just like that train. It chugs along like Sun Records Rock’n’Roll in the gothic drapery of a Western nightscape.

His use of Polysyndeton—the frequent use of conjunctions like “and” where punctuation would typically do—keeps hold of the momentum. Hemingway too was a heavy user of polysyndeton.

Near the end of Beloved—and if you haven’t read it I won’t give too much away—Toni Morrison describes a “loneliness that can be rocked,” rocked like a baby:

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin.

Morrison employs the opposite of polysyndeton, using semi-colons, commas, and em dashes to create a “rocking” rhythm on the page.

These are famous examples, but it’s worth noting that some of the most celebrated authors in American letters paid very deliberate attention to rhythm. Rhythm might be the most useful tool in a writer’s toolbox. It supersedes annoying craft rules like avoiding adverbs and passive voice because often those things themselves serve the rhythm of the sentence.

One reason why I refuse to nix the em dash, which has come under fire via its frequency in A.I.-generated prose, is because it often serves rhythm. And writers can’t dispense with anything, anything at all, that serves the music of their sentences. It’s just not worth it.

Barry Hannah managed to write like a berserko Southern jazz musician (despite being edited by Gordon Lish). In his story “Love Too Long” from Airships, Hannah writes:

She and the architect were having some fancy drinks together at a beach lounge when his ex-wife from New Hampshire showed up naked with a single-shotgun gun that was used in the Franco-Prussian War—it was a quaint piece hanging on the wall in their house when he was at Dartmouth—and screaming.

This is bonkers. It is so wordy that the redundancy of “single-shotgun gun” is somehow allowed. The em dashes pause the sentence, drop the reader out of the scene and into the couple’s living room, into someplace else, someplace calm and quaint and domestic, and then the scene emerges again, suddenly screaming.

One of Hannah’s gifts was that he often wrote the way somebody’s crazy drunk uncle would actually talk, and the sentence was composed with that intent. The sentence cruises along, disorients, and lands with a howl. It flutters about like a sax solo, whereas Morrison’s sentences rock like a cradle, McCarthy’s sentence rollicks along the tracks, and Hemingway’s sentences chop like oars in a skiff.

I still struggle to make my sentences sing, but I think about it a lot more now than I ever did. You don’t ding a writer on adverbs and shit all the time. Just listen. When I’m writing the opening pages to some new story or reworking a novel, the first thing I’m looking at are my opening pages, making sure they’ve got rhythm. Is there music here? Editing for rhythm, not even grammar, really. Not for passive voice if the narrator is plainspoken and it serves the composition. Then you go on and on, sentence-by-sentence, hearing the whole damn thing through, making sure the band’s in the pocket till the needle’s done circling the last groove.

Thanks for tuning in to Pedal Steel. This piece discusses three tiers of work in the noir fiction genre-family, all of which have held an increasing influence over my own writing and literary principles or what-have-you. I also take some time to look back over this past year in reading and writing, and a near-year of using this increasingly popular newsletter software. Thanks to everyone who’s subscribed and followed and shared my work thus far and I hope I’m returning the favor in some small way. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and Happy New Year and I’ll see you on the other side.

This year, I read at least two mystery-thriller novels in a whole other category from your typical tight, nitty-gritty noir. They are ambitious and complex and richly written, extremely competent at the line-level—more of a “General Good Writer” voice than that which gives you the old uncanny shock and delight, wrought by those rare practitioners who keep you coming back to their books, time and again, across your lifetime. The two that come to mind are James A. McLaughlin’s Bearskin (2018) and Tana French’s bestseller In the Woods (2007). Late to the game, enjoyed both.

Bearskin is an Appalachian tale of an ex-narco-turned-Forest Service ranger (or something like that) who’s changed his name and taken exile, overseeing a Virginia wildlife refuge, steering far clear of the cartel members he’d double-crossed back in a Southwestern past life.

He begins to investigate a local redneck gang poaching black bears (for their black market-friendly gall bladders). Lovely, place-rooted atmosphere and violence and bad weather and psychedelic freak-outs and eerie anthropomorphic transformations ensue.

In the Woods is like a more understated season of True Detective—Season Three if it were set in Ireland. It takes place in a rural community south of Dublin, called Knocknaree (terrific name), in which a young girl is found murdered and left on a historic altar stone in the local wood. One of the investigators from the Dublin murder squad was a victim there twenty years prior—a child the same age as the girl. He was found gripping a tree, blood filling his shoes, the close friends he’d been with gone missing without a trace. It’s a psychological thriller told in the first person, a densely packed (smaller typeface) 420 pages.

Why I mention the page-count and typeface is just because it differs from your standard, quick-read thriller format, and both books are markedly more ambitious—with slower narrative build-ups and an elegance in their telling. And, again, highly competent at the line-level. Even lyrical, sometimes lovely. McLaughlin’s descriptions of nature can be quite beautiful.

I’ve noticed three distinct types of thriller over the years, and one is this sort of ambitious mystery (I know I’m just going to wind up using “mystery” and “thriller” and “crime” and “noir” and “detective fiction” interchangeably), breaking away from formal genre norms. Big and bold and elegant.

Sometimes such a novel triggers buzz, cross-genre appeal. Even awards. But I also mentioned that these novels don’t necessarily possess moments or bursts of prose that call you back for more and more and more, well after you’ve finished the book. You might re-read it, but you wouldn’t tell a literary friend: “Jesus, check out this paragraph on page ninety-one.”

I liked these books very much and am going to get another Tana French novel as soon as I’m able. But the wonky, surprising sentences found more often in literary fiction aren’t really a significant part of the package. There’s some secret ingredient, unnamable, in a Denis Johnson work that just doesn’t appear in lots of even highly acclaimed detective fiction.

This isn’t a knock. Functionally, it’s just not that necessary for the genre. Think of a book that’s pure lyricism—like Barry Hannah’s Ray, or a recent Booker Prize-winner, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. These would not be very compelling stories without that poetic backbone. The cinematic narratives of ambitious mystery and thriller novels are the chief aims for their authors. Any striking, poetic prose here is just a bonus, and too much of that would get in the way of the story.

Then there’s your second kind, your standard hardboiled noir that clocks in under 325 pages and the prose is no-nonsense, even if it exudes a little atmosphere and panache. Two Scandinavian (“Scandi Noir”) authors I like are Henning Mankell (Faceless Killers is terrific) and Ragnar Jónasson (the Detective Ari Thor mysteries are good). The Scandi Noir genre is great because you have that baked-in, frigid atmosphere. But they’re very straightforward as far as style. Page-turners. Icy and clean. When this mode is done well, very good stuff.

Two novels I read this year, James Lee Burke’s The Neon Rain (I’m embarrassed this is the first time I’ve read it) and Peter Farris’ The Devil Himself, are of a third kind.

This kind of novel can be twisty or complex or ice-cold and straight as a plumb line, whatever, but there’s something in the prose you have to get back to.

James Lee Burke was greatly influenced by Faulkner as a young man, wrote more literary work early on, and his 1986 novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie was published by a small press (Louisiana State University) and nominated for a Pulitzer. It was in 1987 when Henry Holt published his hard boiled detective novel The Neon Rain, the first of the Detective Dave Robicheaux series.

It’s obviously tied to genre conventions in a profound way, has commercial appeal, all of that, but Burke is a uniquely gifted writer. His story is that of a struggling young writer with literary ambitions who broke out, able then to support his family with writing, by dropping through the trapdoor of commercial and genre fiction. You can’t fault the hustle, and his virtuoso chops bleed into the pages of his noirs. He’s funny as hell too, and the so-sticky-and-close-you-can-feel-it-under-your-fingernails sense of place in his work has a depth that can only be achieved by a master.

The writing itself has a personality, plain and simple, one you’d like to get another beer with as soon as you’re able. You’d like to be best friends. There are flashbacks to Robicheaux’s time in Vietnam that are so vibrant and hallucinatory that Burke’s ambitions as a stylist—in addition to being a storyteller—rise up, making you do a double-take. There’s a surreal scene in which the detective’s on a bender and runs into a band of ludicrous carnival folk in a bar that feels wrought by Denis Johnson (Bringing him up again. Johnson was not a stranger to the detective fiction mode), or even Cormac McCarthy.

Farris’s The Devil Himself (2022) is a pitch-dark Georgia noir about a victim of sex trafficking breaking loose from her captors in a field of scarecrows, then taken under the wing of a violent old man married to a mannequin. Its prose is reduced to a cast-iron-dark demi and he takes risks with humor and grotesqueries that veer from Tarantino-esque violence and into the absurd. He pulls it off because he’s such a confident writer, and there’s a darkness he allows into his fiction that many noir novels only claim to possess. He’s a master of metaphor, too, and there’s a distinct poetic undercurrent beneath Farris’s largely plainspoken delivery. I’ve read the book—and then I’ve read the book again, this writer going back to take another gander and see how it’s done.

As far as I know, most of Farris’s books are first published in France, to considerable acclaim, and then occasionally picked up by presses in the US. The Devil Himself was released by ’s noir imprint Arcade Crimewise, several years after it’d been published in France. However, I’ve yet to get a hold of a few of his books because they’ve never found an American publisher. Which is absolutely wild to me considering his talent. Look at his website. It’s like half the website’s written in French. But, you know, for me this only adds to guy’s mystique.

Anyway, what am I getting at? Okay. I’d recommend any of the above-mentioned authors and books. I tolerate, in genre fiction (chiefly thriller/noir and to a lesser degree horror), the straightforward and conventional, the competent, the highly competent, and then what’s masterful or delightfully strange.

I don’t give the same leeway to literary fiction, and not because it’s more aspirational.

I don’t really care if it’s aspirational. If it’s sublime, it’s sublime and you just know it. The good stuff is very, very good. But even a mediocre work of literary fiction can be very, very bad. It’s not because the lit fic book failed to live up to it’s ambition (and it surely did, if there was any ambition to begin with). It’s because it won’t be worth your time. There’s nothing to offer a reader. It’s like the acquaintance or friend-ish person who shows up to dinner or a party with no good jokes, or even a six-pack.

Genre fiction often scratches the same itch that film does. You’re far more lenient with it. Bad literary fiction can be boring, self-indulgent or navel-gazy, propagandistic or moralistic yet bereft of aesthetic soul; it can be formally gimmicky; it can read like a semi-autobiographical screed no one on earth ever asked for; it can be insufferably twee and urbane and possess no magic or stylistic rigor and just exist because the writer went to Iowa and feels an obligation. I don’t know, there are a million reasons why bad literary fiction is so much worse than an airport throwaway that keeps you guessing who the murderer is.

Peter Farris and James Lee Burke have an advantage too because their works exist in the Southern Gothic province. (Disclaimer: I am very, very biased towards this little genre whose twentieth century heyday I long for, and whose books nudged me into the pursuit of writing fiction.)

Much great Southern Gothic fiction bears genre elements and its best practitioners achieve literary gravitas with language—while also offering a blistering or shocking or bizarre story. Story, story, story!

In the twenty-first century, in fact, these books are now generally labeled something along the lines of “country noir” by default, such is their relationship with thriller, crime and horror tropes and pacing. I’m thinking of Daniel Woodrell (RIP), Michael Farris Smith, Ron Rash, and definitely Peter Farris. Lots more.

The old Southern Gothic label seems now to be used—insofar as the books are marketed—for commercial spooky family sagas set in the South. But it used to be applied to books like Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God and Outer Dark, slim tales told in lyrical yet hard-pan prose whose narratives could easily—if released today—be Horror-categorized by booksellers. Harry Crews wrote a lot of depraved fiction, and Flannery’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is about a family meeting their fates at the hands of a serial killer. Faulkner’s Sanctuary comes to mind. William Gay’s Twilight is horror-adjacent in the vein of early McCarthy, and many of his short stories feature dead bodies.

I guess my point—if I have one—is that Southern Gothic has always been at least cross-genre-curious, even for its writers with the highest of literary aspirations. It is borne of a violent, nasty region to which its artists hold deep spiritual ties bordering on obsession.

Anyway, I have nothing else to say about any of the above. Talking about some books I’ve read in 2025 also just gives me a chance to look back on a good year for reading and an exciting year in writing and publishing.

Once the ink has dried, I’ll be making an exciting announcement regarding my forthcoming contribution to our beloved Southern Grotesque Letters. Stay tuned.

Speaking of Southern Grotesque Letters, one of the best novels I read this year was Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline, released by County Highway’s new Panamerica Books, which I covered here. Please read that, and read his fantastic noir-grotesque debut Nitro Mountain (Knopf).

Here are some other books I read for the first time this year that I enjoyed, and with some bloated assessments of what genre they actually are, avoiding the word “literary”:

• Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter (Pacific Northwest Noir/Prison Drama, borderline Rockabilly Noir)

• The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (Hard Boiled-ass Psycho Noir)

• The Trees, Percival Everett (Horror-Satire)

• Off Season by Jack Ketchum (Stone Cold Rural Cannibal Horror)

• A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (Possession Horror)

• SEEK by Denis Johnson (Non-fiction/Alt Reportage/Whacko Americanzo Gonzo (I just recently came up with this stupid fucking genre name))

• Lee Johnson’s Bloodline is also “Whacko Americanzo Gonzo”

• Faulkner’s Sanctuary (Mildly Impressionistic Country Noir)

• The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson (Icelandic “Scandi” Noir)

• When the Clock Broke by John Ganz (1990s Whacko Americanzo Gonzo Political History)

• Perchance to Dream by Charles Beaumont (Short stories covering the full gamut of “speculative” fiction by one of the OG “Twilight Zone” writers)

• Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto (Crime/ Texas Noir) — fun times reading the first work by the man who created season one of True Detective

• Night People by Barry Gifford (Rockabilly Noir (look it up))

• The Revenant by Michael Punke (Histotical/Western/Survival-Adventure)

• Hell House by Richard Matheson (Very 1970s Sleazy Haunted House Horror)

• Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King (The genre is “Stephen King”)

These books, as well as Bearskin, In The Woods, The Neon Rain, and The Devil Himself, represent the kind of mix I’ve been looking for, further diversifying my literary diet. You’ll learn more techniques by reading across genres and across levels of technical or aesthetic mastership.

Faulkner told us, “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write.”

Some of my re-reads this year fit into this mix, and while revising my novel earlier this year I frequently revisited James Dickey’s Deliverance, Davis Grubb’s Night of the Hunter and Cormac’s early Tennessee novels. All books I’ll go back to time and again till I’m dead.

And now I look back on another year in reading and writing and living:

This year, I started a newsletter in February called “Puryear’s Southern Lit Jukebox” (of course) and then renamed it “Pedal Steel” in the summertime, hoping to broaden the whole vibe of the newsletter. It’s been a hell of a lot of fun running this thing, and it’s provided a significant outlet for my writing, a place where I can run a little wild and blow off some steam, and I’m grateful as hell to the two-hundred(ish)-and-counting folks who’ve decided my writing is worth hitting their inboxes every month or so. Thank you.

It started off as a place to talk about Southern fiction but rapidly morphed into a venue for unhinged American noir essays, of which I wrote a kind of triptych: Rockabilly Noir, His Master’s Voice Is Calling Me, and Slasherland. I won’t be able to write any essays like that again, not for a while. You shouldn’t expect much of that from a newsletter. It’s a testament to the craft that you just can’t bang that shit out.

This software gathers a lot of writers, from all stages of their careers, writers with different goals, established and unknowns and self-published and traditionally published authors. A very vocal anti-establishment cadre exists here—which is necessary in any literary era—and many of these folks read a popular lit crit journal called . I wrote a piece for that journal defending MFA programs, which was kind of the first thing I wrote this year that was noticed by more than twenty people. Seemed suicidal, given how aware I was of the vibe. But you gotta arrive swinging, and honest. Some people actually liked it.

Some of the best culture writing I’ve encountered this year has appeared on this platform, by independent writers. Right now, it’s filling some gaps as traditional media outlets purge their book reviews sections and magazines like Esquire are publishing recaps of Stranger Things episodes and not much else … and I guess don’t publish fiction anymore?

Sometimes I get a little tired of reading takes on how shitty and middlebrow everything is now, and wish many of these independent authors would spend less time writing polemics and more time creating genuinely strange and unique art and seeking out contemporary stuff that fits the bill (it does exist, you just have to look harder). One of my favorite newsletters on here is “Counter Craft” by because he offers more clear-eyed takes on the books and publishing landscape. ’s “Woman of Letters” offers a similar reprieve, and these writers have experiences in both traditional and indie realms, which uniquely positions them to report on literary matters through a sober lens.

Altogether, being on the platform has enrichened my own literary diet, adding a whole other, much-needed layer in 2025.

In April or I think May, I signed with a literary agent, still a shock to me. I’d started seeking agents about five years ago. 2025 was starting to feel like a very writerly year for guy who was starting to really feel the ravages of rejection and doubt. About fifteen years in the trenches.

In June, my first child was born. In the fall, we took an amazing road trip back down to Tennessee (I live in Montana), and all over the country, and it was around that time when things started looking good for my book. I managed to place a couple stories in journals, met some cool people and made some meaningful connections, and continued working again with for the American travel and culture publisher and magazine Wildsam. There isn’t a single writerly milestone or thing I’ve written this year that doesn’t feel true and consequential and I’m more grateful in 2025 than I’ve ever been. Surely 2026 is going to be a disaster.

This will be my last post until the new year. It’s winter. Time to hunker down and get some writing (fiction) done. I don’t have anything to say, or any clever way to end this thing. Nothing brilliant on my mind. Like I said earlier, you shouldn’t expect too much, not all the time, from a newsletter, whose model is “post enough so you don’t lose subscribers.” And great writing takes time. It comes. It goes. It takes on new forms.

Life goes into new forms - Neal Cassady

This is the epigraph that opens Denis Johnson’s novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, a story about a suicidal Cape Cod-transplant who gets work as a disc jockey, yet starts doing a little private detective dabbling on the side. I think Johnson knew the detective novel was a kind of trap door into more propulsive narrative zones—and perhaps sales; evidently Johnson was still using advances and rights acquisitions to pay off considerable debts, well into his life of literary repute. (Although I doubt Resuscitation yielded much sales; it’s just as unwieldy as a handful of other out-of-left-field Johnson pursuits; it’s also fabulous, by the way.)

But Johnson was a chameleon, who likely followed Faulkner’s advice. He started out as a poet, was a junkie and a liar and a criminal. He wrote novels. He wrote American Gothic road novels (Angels), post-apocalyptic novels (Fiskadoro) and got sober. Moved to the Idaho woods. Probably relapsed somewhere along the line. Moved to the California coast. Married three times. Wrote a strange, gorgeous Western (Train Dreams) and then a straight-up Heist novel (Nobody Move).

Who the hell knows what else he did. You change. You’re good and then you’re bad and then you’re good again. Then you’re bad again. You write at all levels. You keep going. You have no idea what’s going to happen to you. You have no idea what your life and who you are is going to do to other people. How and what you’re going to write. Life goes into new forms.

I’d saved for it, new brake pads and rotors, but the money disappeared before they finished the job, so I called up Rex and told him, “Feel free to keep her awhile till I get, like, I’m sorry, just other stuff happened—you know how it is,” but he just said yeah yeah yeah and hung up the phone. A couple of days later, Alida and I walked through town, a gray, late-fall day, cold, the sidewalks paved with a soft bed of blackened leaves, and we shortcutted through an alleyway and came around back of Rex’s shop, where the too-far-gone jalopies and the generally abandoned sulked and squatted near-undercover of meadow grass, the mountains stark and blue and cold-looking so far behind. And there sat Big Mona, my decrepit ‘89 Bronco, fresh brake pads and rotors. I told Big Mona, “Baby, if I could just run off with you,” and Alida said, “I’ve been waiting just to hear you say that.”

How I’d ended up here in La Jara, Colorado, I cannot tell you. Maybe for the dispensaries, like Maggie’s Farm north of us, or the little shop just south in Antonito. But I didn’t like smoking anymore, except cigarettes. There were, in fact, no substances involved whatsoever in the untimely squandering of my vehicle repair money.

Alida was a dancer in Alamosa. The first time I saw her, a couple days before, I’d just put the Bronco in the shop and borrowed Leslie Crowder’s—we’d been putting up fence together at Stokes Ranch—little Honda Accord, his other car, his wife’s car.

I’d driven to the Fox Barn in Alamosa for a Saturday night lark with my buddy Keaton Wayne, and the moment I saw her, young and pale with a set of dark eyes that held, in some way, a kind of mute philosophy, skyward and beyond religion—I could just see it there—I knew I’d needed to swing by Marvin’s the next day and buy that eighty-dollar Levi’s denim jacket, those ostrich skin Justin boots. So I did.

It wasn’t all the car money, but it was enough to keep Mona captive in the shop awhile, plus I needed to spend a little money at the Fox Barn, too, a great deal of money, in fact, to convince Alida I was there for love and honest love alone.

I was lucky she was even there the next night, a Sunday night, the place practically empty. In the little back mirrored room I let it be known, very clearly, that the sharp new clothes and the wad of twenties in my pocket were for her.

We sat and talked, though, longer than the dancing, and the other stuff. She said she was from Romeo, Colorado. Romeo! I had a vision, then: Alida and I, together, sucked through the club’s pink neon tubing, shot out of a pink neon double-barrel shotgun into the sky, and jitterbugging now among the planets—something of this nature. That night, she ended up at my place. In bed, I had to tell her it wasn’t my Honda which brought us there, that I wouldn’t be getting my Mona back because, do you want to know why? Because of you.

So we stood there, together, days later, in Rex’s junkyard on a cold, late fall day, funereal here with our gazes fixed upon the newly mended Mona, and Alida said to me, “I know a couple guys.”

“Bet you do,” I said.

“Not like that. Like, they could get back your keys.”

“Hell, if I was going to rob Rex I’d just do it myself,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

“I wouldn’t be getting jealous yet if I were you,” she said. “I’m simply taking you out to test.”

“Oh, if you were me?” I said. “Besides, love at first sight, remember that.”

“That’s what was said,” she told me. “But that was the other night.”

“Ever broken into a car?” she said. We’d been walking up Broadway toward El Vallecito for enchiladas, a little grandmother’s kitchen of a place off 285 where they served sweet tea—which I’d missed so badly from back home—and smothered everything in red chile sauce.

I didn’t want to answer her question because I didn’t know the right way.

Then, finally, I told her, “Well, I mean, when I was a teenager, yeah, I got into a lot of that stuff.”

This was a lie, though it was a very balanced thing to say. It should’ve pleased anybody. Alida, for a time as well, failed to comment.

“Okay, but I can tell you,” I said, “that I don’t know how to hotwire a car anyway, if that’s what you’re getting at. Besides, I think Big Mona’s above that sort of thing.”

Now we sat down in a booth, and the little lady sidled over, wearing a hibiscus printed apron, a tattoo of Felix the Cat on her hand. She took our orders, dropped off some tea, and I felt then, already, that Alida, after such a short time, was slipping from me. What were the right things to say, ask, to suggest? I looked into those eyes because, on the first night I saw her, I was certain inside them lay answers, proverbs, and the lessons of Romeo, Colorado.

They, all of them, were still there.

“I love you,” I said. “I know it’s crazy.”

“I think I can feel it too,” she said, and reached across the table, did a little wave with her fingers. I wiggled my fingers back. We wiggled fingers in pursuit across the smooth tabletop until they touched.

The old couple at the booth across the dining room stared at us. I didn’t care. I was ready to do my first break-in.

“Well Rex, I know, he keeps a garage door opener in his car. It opens up the back of the shop. So we’ve just got to get into Rex’s car. No hotwiring involved.”

“What for?” she said.

“My keys’ll be in the shop.”

“You’re smarter than I figured,” she said.

“I know I am.”

Over enchiladas, we said nothing. Too much flavor here. Things couldn’t have been better in that moment. My phone buzzed. A text from Leslie Crowder. It said: You gotta get that Honda back or my wife’ll kill us both dead.

But I told him, Leslie, that I’d need it another night, just one. He did not respond. We left El Vallecito, went to my place to make love all afternoon, which we more or less did.

My place was an apartment above the garage in back of an invalid’s home, Mr. Schaefer. I could go three months not paying rent before Schaefer even noticed. He’d wheel his way on out and fix himself before the garage doors, shouting, “Money! Money! Money!”

I’d crack the little window, stick my head out and say, “Old Schaef, you didn’t see it there, put it in the mailbox, yeah? I’m sure you’ve got, like, some sort of pile in your home. That’s where you’ll find it.”

He would grunt and wheel away, only moments later returning to cry, “You’re a liar, Banks.”

“My Jesus,” I’d say. “How could I—well, hang on a minute.” And I’d drop an envelope out the window, wishing it would drift down onto his lap—he couldn’t bend himself—but normally, no, I’d have to run down there and fetch it, which always seemed to very easily sweeten his perception of me.

This was the type of story I wasn’t sure I could tell Alida; same situation as the question concerning car theft. But where does the line exist between being a bad man, a scoundrel, or just a joker, someone bearing the cache of a kind man with a good, clean wild streak? That’s what you can’t ever figure with folks like Alida. Though now, under the spell of sluggish after-sex ecstasy, I told her of my run-ins with Mr. Schaefer, and she poured her flesh upon me and said, “You are such a high-flying son of a bitch,” and I’d never heard those words said better in all my life.

Alida said she’d call up one of those boys she’d been talking about, the ones she knew, about whom I was suspicious, and she said, “Ronnie’s got a Slim Jim kit.”

“He going to ask what for?” I said.

“It’s none of his goddamn business. We’ll tell him you locked your keys in the car.”

“But this is how it’s going to go,” I said. “He’s going to figure on meeting us at whatever car’s locked up, probably using the Slim Jim himself, and then he’ll like to get straight back home with it.”

“We’ll tell him we need it overnight,” she said.

“Ridiculous. Nobody would need a Slim Jim overnight.”

“Then suck it. I said it was none of his business. I think you’re scared.”

“I have never been scared, for the love of god, I have never been scared,” I said. “Tell him you’re working, and to drop it off there.”

“But I’m not working,” she said.

God, I felt, then, a plunging. I could barely live to once more open my mouth, even, to issue forth a single syllable conveying optimism or joy. It was the comedown after sex, it was Alida’s disagreeableness, it was love come and gone quick as heat lightning. Just as suddenly, though, it would return. I touched her breast, dipped my head against the nape of her neck, and smelled her. There it was.

“Let’s do it again,” I said. “I need it now more than ever.”

“Don’t get this way, Christ,” she said.

“We don’t even have a destination,” I said.

“When we get Big Mona back,” she said. “We go West. Farther West. That’s what people do, isn’t it?”

“I believe that’s true.”

“I told you, I want to be an actress.”

“You never told me that.”

“I did,” she said. She patted my head, and massaged my earlobes between her fingertips. “I certainly did.”

Alida’s friend Ronnie dropped off the Slim Jim on Mr. Schaefer’s front porch. We never saw sight of him. Alida had cooked up a pretty good story, the locked car stranded in Santa Fe—she’d have to make a full day of it.

I held the tool in my hands, big hook shaped like a little brass shepherd’s cane, and said, “How do you even—”

“I think you just stick it down in there and have at it,” she said.

“I must, I mean, I’m going to have to get drunk for this.”

Midnight at the Black Cat, four whiskeys in apiece, we fabricated stories concerning our future, laughed about them, Alida’s half-drunk eyes tearing up as though touched with nostalgia, as though these things had already happened, receding far into the past where you can only talk about them with wavering accuracy, as though we had now reached a tranquil, less exciting time in our long lives, well-settled now into the sorrow of age, commitment, and love.

First thing we did that evening was drop Leslie’s Honda off, a good deed. I threw Leslie the keys, and he caught them and said, “Thanks, motherfucker. Need a ride someplace?”

“No,” I said, though Alida had started to open her mouth.

But we would never again need a ride anywhere from anybody. We turned onto the road and I’d hoped Leslie didn’t see the Slim Jim, this big hook I swung around like I’d needed to hurt somebody.

Alida and I then advanced onto Broadway heading for the Black Cat, reaching toward the beginning of something.

So six whiskeys now, and that’s just good enough. We paid the bartender. Rex’s house wasn’t too far off, but just far enough from the shop where Big Mona waited. Down the darkened street Alida started trembling. I asked her why. She said she couldn’t get over the excitement.

We walked the few blocks toward Rex’s place. This town kept right under a thousand people, wasn’t too far getting anywhere. I could’ve gone, in fact, without a vehicle altogether. I have at times considered myself a walker. But I couldn’t have gone far that way with Alida. So readily she clung to me. I knew she did not want to remain in Alamosa, much less settle down here in La Jara. She was twenty-three and lived with her mother. She lied about her dancing job. She worked at Ace Hardware days to help her mother pay bills, and nights at the Fox Barn was just get-the-fuck-out-of-here money. Her mother simply figured she was a dope fiend, Alida out so many nights until three, four AM, often not coming home at all. But her mother didn’t care.

Alida said she’d had a premonition upon first sight of me. It was, likewise, all in the eyes. She said she could see inside them a very good man, a tender man. But she was also okay with me breaking into somebody’s car.

Walking down Pine, I slung my arm around her waist. She rocked her head against my shoulder, just banged it and banged it, and laughed. She had short, oily hair that kind of just danced all over the place at the slightest motion. We kept undercover of shadows, avoiding the street lamps that shone upon sidewalks overtaken by crabgrass, cigarette butts, and the hieroglyphs of children dragging sticks across fresh-poured concrete decades ago.

“We should’ve packed up already,” she said.

“You have, like, two outfits at my house.”

“Well, you should’ve packed up already.”

“I don’t need much. Mr. Schaefer’ll find something to do with the rest of that shit. Don’t start worrying now, like you do.”

“Like I do?” she said. “We’ve only known each other, what, three days?”

“Two,” I said. “And two damn good ones. It’s fun though, pretending we know each other like that. You know like, Oh, that’s just like you, honey.”

“Just like me,” she said.

We came upon Rex’s front lawn, and you could see the blue television glow through the window, the blinds closed half a turn. I walked right up to that window and Alida hissed, “Are you absolutely bat-shit?”

“Hush,” I whispered back. “I don’t see him.”

We stood by the driver’s side of his Chevy Blazer. Dogs were barking. Everywhere. I’d hoped Rex didn’t have one. Pretty sure he didn’t, but my hands rattled. I’d hoped Alida didn’t notice this as I dipped the hook into the crack of the window channel. “Please,” she kept saying. Not hurry up, but please, please, please, over and over again. I liked hearing her say it. I took my time.

A pair of headlights lit up the street and I dropped down and rolled underneath the Blazer. The vehicle passed. I rolled over again, leapt to my feet, and Alida started laughing. “You think I’m scared, don’t you,” I said.

“It’s cute,” she said. “Truly. Give her a kiss.”

“Maybe once we get done.”

“No. Now.” She pulled me in. I held her.

I’d been married once, very young. But I don’t remember ever holding my wife like this. Ever. And that had lasted years.

“I taste good, don’t I?” she said. “I think I see him there, sitting on the couch.”

“The car light’ll come on,” I said. “He’ll see it. We can’t open it up until his ass goes to bed. Jesus. It’s two fucking AM. Go. To. Bed. Sir.”

“At least get it unlocked,” she said. “I’m literally going to vomit.”

And, with utterly zero method, I pushed and pulled at that hook until the lock clicked, and so we waited. But Alida said she couldn’t wait any longer, it was now or never. I took this in a number of ways, none of which I liked. I opened the door a crack. The dome light ignited. I reached for the visor and yanked out two garage door openers and slammed the door. We both dropped to the ground. “That was. Fucking. Loud,” she said.

Rex’s front door opened. We rolled under the Blazer, tucked beneath the driver’s side, holding each other, eyes gaping, so fearful, each into each. I could see his feet upon the front lawn. He looked to be rocking from side to side. I heard the crack and hiss of his beer can opening.

He turned and went inside. It really could’ve been any car he’d heard.

There were cars parked across the street, cars next door, cars everywhere. In this town, it seemed there were more cars than people and places.

We lay there a long time, until Alida said to me, our noses touching, “I feel safe now,” and I could not tell you how these words made me feel, only that, immediately, I rolled out from beneath that vehicle, took her hand, and we duck-and-ran along the parade of parked cars lining the other side of the street. We passed a house with the windows lit up, folks on the porch drinking and laughing and listening to some kind of serpentine slide-guitar thing, many people over there having a time together, and I prayed they would not see us pass. We again advanced into darkness. And beyond, like a streetlamp-lit cathedral of strange, high, intersecting Colonial gables pitched upon a slanted vestibule of corrugated sheet iron, an old grain elevator towered alongside the dark and empty train tracks, tracks from which you now of a night seldom heard, as in earlier times, the lulling music of searing iron, of blazing horn.

“I don’t know which one of these works,” I said. We walked again through the dead leaf-carpeted alleyway, and into Rex’s junkyard. I walked over to Big Mona. I petted her.

“You just love this,” she said. “Taking your time.”

“Told you I wasn’t scared.”

“Please,” she said.

I tried the first opener, got nothing. I pressed the other one, and this great door arose, and made such a horrible sound of shrieking metal, its rollers lurching through their tracks, and a kind of metallic roar that caused me utter fear far beyond language or even thought. It would never end. I just stood there. I didn’t even perceive Alida’s standing there. When the garage door ceased rising, we entered. I turned my phone on for light, searching the walls for switches. When I found it, and flipped that switch, things changed. The fluorescent-lit garage appeared like a marvelous theatre of phosphorus. Alida covered her eyes, fell into me, my god. I closed mine and many colors danced on the backs of my black eyelids. I opened them now. I’d been here before, but never like this. Shiny sports cars jacked up with creeper chairs rolled underneath, a topless ladies-calendar hanging above one of the shop tables, sweet-smelling oil puddles on the dusty concrete floor. I told Alida, “I want something like this in my life. I want to own something.”

“I imagine you will,” she said.

“But I want a motorcycle shop.”

“California’s good for that. You ride?”

“Dabbled,” I said. “But I had a buddy get in a pretty bad accident. That sort of thing, it’ll make you think. But I’m ready to get back into it.”

“You’re ready to get back into a lot of things,” she said.

Above the shop table, by the topless ladies-calendar, I searched the hook-board for Big Mona’s keys, snatched them, dropped them in my pocket and told Alida that, as much as I’d wanted to stay and pretend I was Prince Of the Auto Shop, we needed to light out of here.

I pressed the button and the garage descended with its terrifying steel jawed-sound again, and I said, “Well, what do we do with this?”

Alida snatched the garage door opener from me and underhand tossed it into the garage just before the thing got all the way shut.

I opened up Big Mona, slid inside her. “You like?” I said.

“All I’d ever been dreaming about.” she said.

Schaefer’s house lay just outside the town limits, on Estrella Street. Alida leaned and rested her head on my knee, and I put my arm around her, clutching the shifter, and removing it from time to time to bury my fingers into that oily hair. “I don’t know if I can handle the drive tomorrow,” she said.

“Just go ahead and sleep,” I said.

“We’re almost home,” she said.

She called my place home. She did. It could’ve worked out between us here, in La Jara.

A vehicle swung off County Road 5, revved up and gunned it so close as to likely rear-end us. Its brights now shone and Alida shot up and tilted the rearview mirror. I couldn’t see a thing. The vehicle would not relent. I held her hand. She closed her eyes. “Please,” she said, to somebody. “Please, please, please, please.”

I mashed the gas. I passed the turnoff to Schaefer’s house and just kept going, hitting seventy, eighty, eighty-five. The vehicle drove into the other lane.

It nosed by us, but it did not pass.

I did not see the driver’s face.

Alida said, “This is too much. This is just way too much for two days. Too much, it always ends up too much.”

And what could I do, now, but just hammer the brakes and let the stranger pass, turn around, drive home, lay her to bed, vanish into another room, and get on the phone? She said she saw in my eyes a very good man. A man who might call up Rex and say, “Listen, I’ve got something kind of crazy to tell you. I am sorry. I have been so desperate, Rex, I have been so desperate, and I am telling you this without a single lie in my heart.”

Thanks for tuning into Pedal Steel. It’s been a while since I’ve written a post or essay here. I’m raising my now four-month-old son, off paternity leave too and working full time, and I’ve had a novel out there looking for a publisher, which alone has been an experience. Life is getting large, in both directions. Anyway, my lady and our son and I embarked on a major road trip about which I’ll write below. However, there’s likely more coming off of that down the pike.

We’d stopped at a Buc-ee’s in Amarillo, Texas, me and what I’d call my Common Law Wife and our four-month-old son. Buc-ee’s is a massive, cartoon beaver-themed convenience superstore I’d not been aware of until a few years ago because there is no Buc-ee’s in my adopted home state of Montana. They exist largely in Texas and across my native South.

It is a spectacle. There’s a beef jerky bar bigger than a supermarket deli case, myriad flavors of kippered butchery behind glass. The centerpiece of a Buc-ee’s is an open kitchen slinging ready-made beef brisket sandwiches, fried chicken and warm candied nuts, mainly pecans, among many other treats. The workers therein—smiling cooks standing about a massive butcher’s block-kitchen island piled with smoked brisket—all don yellow cowboy hats of Halloween costume shop-quality. This does not even begin to describe the scope of Buc-ee’s.

And why my story starts here, at Buc-ee’s, a pit-stop five days into our second cross-country road trip in six weeks, I can’t really tell you. Except that Buc-ee’s is a strange crossover between the “grim, desiccated” America acknowledges in his terrific profile of , and the America Begler and Garvey both seek, one of a still-existing bizarro wonderland-slash-grimscape of roadside attractions and dives and road-worn characters bellied up at unknown zones. Basically the Old, Weird America of music writer .

Buc-ee’s sits at the fault line between these two national identities chiefly because it is truly modern and in many ways appalling, however, it’s just outrageous enough. Distinctly American in its authentic inauthenticity. Midcentury motels whose neon drips and slashes through your windshield off a dark highway, the original Holiday Inns, traveling carnivals and Wall Drug, South Dakota, a World’s Largest Jackalope statue, and today’s fireworks superstores across the South and Buc-ee’s; it’s all the same exercises in maximalism amid wild, empty country at the aesthetic heart of America’s Tormented Soul of Contradictions.

We were on our way to Tucumcari, New Mexico. To the Mother Road, old US Route 66. We’d booked the Motel Safari, a classic throwback motor lodge in a town gone to seed, once a landmark of mid-century neon Americana—it still is today if you put on the right pair of shades.

It’s the storied patina beneath which these motels sulk, rendering them still-appealing to the modern road dog who seeks something uniquely of this particular part of the world. Something that isn’t fully dead. Surely these motor lodges with their blazing tubed signs and kitschy Western decorative flourishes and plasticine totem poles seemed very Buc-ee’s-like to a number of discerning travelers fifty and seventy years ago. Surely some had found them garish, anathema to the bucolic panoramas upon which they accumulated like strung neon tumors buzzing in the barren valleys.

We were traveling so my extended family in Tennessee could spend time with our infant son. My boss-men agreed to allow me a month’s remote work. Since we’d rather have our own car and some freedom in Tennessee, flying didn’t make any sense.

We knew with the little one it’d take some extra time getting there, some extra time getting back.

Seven nights on the road down, seven back, two different routes. I’m somewhat seasoned here. Over the past decade-plus I’ve driven a 2,000-miles distance across the country on different routes about six times. I assured my girl that everything would be fine, that the baby would be okay in the car. And the worst thing I can tell you now is that nothing disastrous ever wound up happening.

Terrible for storytelling. But this isn’t fiction. Fictionalized, the baby would lose his mind, the car would have to break down—or something. Something shitty—many shitty things—would have to happen.

In real life, we had a terribly elegiac, sort-of-six-week-road trip (we went somewhere different every weekend while in Tennessee: the Gulf Coast, the Great Smoky Mountains, and a trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, which was partially my own sort of Cormac McCarthy-Suttree pilgrimage).

We experienced—on the way down, Road Trip Part I—Devils Tower, Wyoming, Badlands Park, South Dakota, Native American Reservations, oceans of Nebraska corn, Ozark Riverways; we crossed the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers at Cairo, Illinois, and Paducah, Kentucky; the Gulf and Smokies in between; Road Trip Part II: Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Florence, Alabama, Beale Street in Memphis, Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas, slap-your-mama hole-in-the-wall Tex-Mex in Paris, Texas (and visions of a high and lonesome Harry Dean Stanton), Tucumcari and its surrounding red mesas and then the heart of the Colorado Rockies in Salida and Estes Park; we finished The Shining on audiobook while rolling up to the Stanley Hotel (also of Dumb and Dumber fame); camping under the Milky Way on the high plains of Wyoming, outside Cheyenne; and finally back to Montana. Too much packed in here to describe. Too many details. Too many secret small towns. Artifacts strewn about the shadowlands.

An older post of mine worth revisiting that captures the shadowlands, and the bizarro, delightfully grotesque treasures there:

(Okay. There was one bad experience in Nebraska, obviously. We camped on a lake in the sandhills, setting our tent up on a lakeside beach. We were assailed violently by mosquitos and sand fleas, bites my gal endured for a couple weeks after, looked like she’d stubbed out hundreds of cigarettes on her legs; we’d gotten up around three AM, moving our camping into my Jeep in which we spent most of the night swatting insects and painting berry-colored blood-spots all over the upholstery. All with a very small baby. It was pretty horrible.)

Anyway, to chronicle this journey in a single post right now just doesn’t seem possible. Begler, and his piece on Garvey, inspired me to at least start digging into it all. (Also read his piece Lost Highways, which occupies a similar written universe.)

It has been kind of a mission of mine to use this newsletter as a source of darkly Americana-literary exploration, a space where I can tap into my obsession with regional fiction, the Gothic Open Road, and a freewheeling style inspired by Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft, the films of Terrence Malick and Wim Wenders and select fiction writers, living or dead, who operate under a kind of distinctly ragged American vernacular. Think Train Dreams and Angels, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Barry Hannah’s Ray, Jim Thompson, early McGuane, et cetera et cetera.

PEDAL STEEL breaks away, somewhat, from my larger fictional pursuits (my novel, an Appalachian horror-thriller, is going through the maybe-getting-published channels as I write this). My short fiction, much of it published in journals elsewhere, and some of which I’ve reposted on PEDAL STEEL, is largely road-based and place-based. For non-fiction, I contribute to Wildsam, a publisher and brand focused on American road-travel and culture. (Wildsam’s EIC and his Substack RED HORIZON are wonderful follows around these parts; also, check out and her Substack “Strange Highways” for the American Gothic-meets-the-road vibes).

American travel is something about which I’m deeply passionate, up there with writing and fatherhood and fly fishing.

Though I’d love to spend time traveling abroad, it’s always been my stance that American travel is damned good enough. A) You can do it on a budget or with limited resources or just on-the-fly because you fucking feel like it, and, most importantly B) America is wildly under-discovered by its own residents. Where people find despair and decay, I keep my eyes wide open.

The spooky, goofy old country still thrives, often in scary ways (a carnie president) or ways delightful to those with a high tolerance for kitsch (Buc-ee’s)—and it certainly hides, with old strewn-about remnants, in the darker interstices between cancerous bursts of modernity: the dark alley, the neon sign, the dive bar regular, the rancher, the dreaming trains; the landscapes of Appalachia, the Southwest, the Interior West, massive chasms of emptiness and wondrous natural beauty going toe-to-toe with any region in the world.

The last thing I can say about my trip with my family, a trip I’ll likely write more about in pieces down the line: it affirmed everything I believe. And I can’t put it any better than Begler, about whose piece on Garvey I have no shame in pimping constantly here:

It’s hard not to feel pessimistic if you look too long at the hollowed-out interior of the country and at the obscene divide between wealthy and wretched in the metropoles. And it’s hard to feel good about the state of the written word if you don’t venture beyond the New York Times bestseller list. But I know better. I haven’t yet written it all off as unsalvageable.

If there is indeed a “New Romanticism” flourishing in literature, it’s going to look a lot more like this, it’s going to emerge from these sentiments. This can be achieved, probably, via grand social novels set in big cities, or autofictions or Internet Novels—whatever you’re into, I guess—but when I imagine a New Romanticism, it must hearken back to an Old, Weird America and be uniquely attuned to its vestiges amid the present.

A search for wonder and weirdness and grit in flyover country or darker corners of low mass media sex appeal is what wrought books like Fat City and Huck Finn and Train Dreams and Wise Blood and As I Lay Dying and it absolutely can be done today and absolutely can be channeled into literature in 2026 and beyond. A gruesome cynicism and lack of curiosity ignites some notion that the modern American novel must move towards solipsistic narration and digital realms. What country are you looking at? Instead of passing by the Buc-ee’s and glaring at it in horror, I’d recommend trying the brisket.

iPhones and AI and groaning about a desecrated culture, a declining readership, a dehumanizing tech era … Dwelling on these nasty modern conditions may work very well for some writers, it just doesn’t work well for me. I know what’s hiding out there.

You just have to know how to look for it. If you’ve got it. Something I’ll just call Neon in the Blood, stupidly enough. Whatever. But it’s got a good ring to it. At least I’d like to think so.

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Thanks for tuning into Pedal Steel. “West” was originally published in the journal BULL. You can read it there or you can read it below.

Buy Brett a Beer

They’d been happy a good, short while now, Jack and Mira, cruising I-90 West in a ragged-out nineties Jeep Cherokee. Blue tarp over the busted back windshield smacking and rippling incredibly so they had to keep the stereo blasting. Deep Purple’s “Highway Star.” Soaring past eternal prairie. Nearing middle age and never seen such distances.

Old, hand-painted billboards shuffled past, offering pretty lavish promises: dinosaur gardens, ghost towns, gemstones, the world’s largest bison, the world’s largest everything. Another one suggested they choose life. But that’s just what they were doing.

They’d gotten clean together and wanted to see the country. Lighted out of Tellico Plains, Tennessee, towards something flatter, plain and enormous.

“It’s cute,” Mira said. “Lot of guys? They’d at least like pretend and watch. Kurt? God. Football kind of made him crazy.”

She took a long drag, exhaled a blue stream through the cold cracked window.

“Took it too far,” she told him. “Like, fucked me up a couple times.”

“Guys in there yelling,” Jack said. “But the ladies just sat around talking about this very, very real stuff, you know, like all this mental illness all over the family, all over the place, just a lot of craziness. Really got my brain turned on.”

“Explains why you watch all that gory shit. Monster movies,” she said. “I don’t see how you stand it. Look at the road. Listen.”

Jack barely looked at the road, barely looked at Mira.

“He, like, for real whipped my ass one time,” Mira told him. “Just because his goddamn team lost.”

Jack jerked his head about wildly at all that lost-looking country, this country without any trees. Then he spoke again in a high register, hurled down fully into his history, and farther away from her.

He told her all about the ladies sitting around the kitchen table at his boyhood home in Cleveland, Tennessee, spinning tales on Great Aunt Francis. Queen Crazy. He recalled his Mom talking about electroshock therapy. Jack’s imagination went berserk: he envisioned men wearing long white coats cupping her head with chrome earmuffs hooked to snarls of curled black wire. Some man hauling a lever, streaming blue electricity into her face, after which she’d ignited. The doctor unbound her, peeled the mummy-suit away, and dressed her in a white gown dragging like a waterfall, hair shocked back in a long beehive with Bride of Frankenstein lightning stripes.

“I think you’re just one of them,” Mira said. “You watch Frankenstein like fifty goddamn times because you are Frankenstein. That’s your boy.”

“Everything got real intense,” Jack said. “It’s like Mom gave me mushrooms, but without the mushrooms. Let me get a drag off that.”

“You think you’re a special boy, don’t you?”

“When Dad brought the bowl of Buffalo wings to the table,” he said, and took the drag, “I heard this orchestral blast—trumpets, gongs, you know. After we’d filled our plates up, Dad went back into the living room with my brothers and everybody and just jumped up and down and screamed, literally screamed, at whatever game was on the TV.

“I stuck with the ladies, man. Tell me more about electroshock therapy. Not while we’re eating. That was Aunt Paula. But you could hear my Dad the whole goddamn time, screaming: No! No! Oh, God! God damn it! Get him! Get him! Get him!”

“I was just playing, you know,” Mira told him. “I do think you’re special. Give me that hand.”

But she’d heard this all before. She hoped, really, that Jack might finally tell her something new, maybe even reveal some forthcoming thing, like a portent. A vision as terrifyingly clear as the western sun. But neither of them possessed a knack for seeing the future.

Maybe they wouldn’t go back to Tennessee, is what Jack told her. A true clean break. They could be homesteaders. This is what Jack said. But Mira doubted he’d done his research. Quit drinking, too. Smoking. Eat right. Their teeth would whiten. Their teeth would whiten so much they’d glow in the dark.

Early evening, a massive copper sun cocked westward like they might just drive straight into it. Something lavender colored the air. A scent of lavender.

Mira leaned her head against the warm window, searching the passing country for signs.

“Here it is,” Jack said, cranking the window down. Badlands. Cathedral spires of painted rock. Miles of it. Certainly more magnificent than the Atlanta skyline, or pictures of New York City.

They paid a fee—got into the park just before closing time—and switch-backed down a furrowed gorge threaded with crimson strata.

“How about this here?” Mira said.

A sign read Sage Creek Campground, 8 MI.

“Just want a motel room,” Jack said. “But imagine getting high out here. Almighty god.”

“We’re doing this,” she said, “to stay alive. Remember that”

She flung her arm out the window. Sunlight clung to her face but dissolved in soft, dark purple places around her eyes. She lifted an index finger, as though she might tell Jack what’s what about something or another, but then she dipped the finger into silvering temple hair and rode it along her nape, rattling a shark’s tooth earring.

“Don’t start looking at me like that,” he said.

“What’s going to happen,” she said, “when we get back home?”

“If we go back,” he said. “We’ll take some of this here with us.”

“Cute,” she said. “That’s a cute thing to say.”

Just beyond the rock towers and buttes, the horizon absorbed the sun. Absorbed its light and power. A thin line of blazing amber ignited the space between land and sky. The road rapidly darkened.

Jack and Mira rounded a hairpin curve, and a thunderous RV roared past and blasted its horn.

“Mr. Death Wish,” Mira said. “Look at the goddamn road.”

“I don’t want to die,” Jack said.

He needed to show her that, too. He pulled over, undid her belt buckle, and walked his fingers into her blue jeans.

“Now,” she said. “Yes. Now.”

She closed her eyes. Jack closed his. Reached and turned the stereo up as loud as he could get it. Keith Richards sang, “I’m waiting on a call from you.” Charlie Watts banged the tom drum once, and it echoed across the Badlands. Jack opened his eyes. A bison crossed the road. He’d never seen one. He’d never see one like it again.

They left the park and drove into the Black Hills and stopped in Deadwood.

“Fucking tourist trap,” Mira said.

“Don’t ruin this.”

The sky went full dark and motorcycles parked along the main drag changed colors beneath the neons.

“This is something,” he said.

“All these little casinos give me the creeps.”

“You just need to sleep.”

“I need to get drunk.”

“Never gambled?”

“Told you, gives me the creeps. Look here. Gemstone Museum.”

“And you’re the one complaining about money. They’ll charge twenty dollars apiece to get in there. Come out better here. These are kiddie casinos. Bet against some old-ass computer that looks like a little Ms. Pac-Man.”

“Want to do your own thing, works for me.”

“Thought you wanted to get drunk,” he said. “That’s something we could both get down with.”

“Then park the car already.”

They discovered a bar called Rattlesnake Knights.

The place was ablaze with tourists, miserable-looking elderly lushes in worthless patriotic garb, crushed-faced locals, and road-weary couples just like them. Not talking. Just drinking. Dark eyes and faces lit blue by cell phone screens.

But there were other people, too, holding each other, fully alive. Dancing to ZZ Top.

Jack and Mira sat by this kid at the bar. He looked to be about sixteen, seventeen, but the bartender didn’t care. He wore a long black coat, a feather-banded Bailey hat, pale face painted with cracked foundation, the circles around his eyes deep set and violet-dark.

“What’s the costume about, little man?” Jack said.

“I’m just trying to live,” the kid said. “Fuck-stain.”

“Did you run off from someplace?” Mira said.

“Bad time for talking,” the kid said, and ordered straight warm vodka.

He continued cursing under his breath. The vileness of his phrasing soared while his voice dipped into a whisper.

“If there’s something we can help you with,” Jack said, “just tell us. Right, babe?”

“You got a Mom and Dad someplace?” Mira said.

“It’s all people like you,” he said. “It’s you.”

What he’d meant by that, Jack couldn’t tell. But it became an awful chant. It’s you. It’s you. This chant rose up to the ceiling amid the rafters and smoke.

A man wearing a phony leisure suit and handlebar mustache careened behind the bar and cried out, “No, no, damn it. Wesley, you idiot.”

Wesley was the bartender.

“This town’s like Disneyland,” Mira said, “but for even sorrier people.”

“That’s him.” The owner pointed at the kid. “Out of here, now.” He told Wesley, “Great. You’re fired. Bye-bye.”

The kid in the long black coat shot his last vodka and fled. Jack couldn’t figure out whether or not the whole thing was staged.

“This is what I came here to see,” Mira said.

“Pleasure at the expense of others,” Jack said.

“I can’t stand it,” she said.

“I thought you just said you liked it. Fuck it. Go do your goddamn gemstone museum. Did you know I’m a diamond?”

The bartender, Wesley, flung his apron at the owner, and ascended a rickety spiral staircase in back of the place.

Transfixed, Jack didn’t catch Mira slipping off, shouldering her way through the crowd, and bounding out the door and onto the street, where a massive pistol report cracked, hushing everybody in the bar.

Jack drained his whiskey, ate the ice, and walked out of there.

The kid in the long black coat lay face down upon a storm drain, where the neon lights shone. A pistol lay by his little hand. Moments ago, this kid had not been in Rattlesnake Knights with Jack and Mira, but rather existed inside some very particular moment right before you shoot your own face.

Jack and Mira, they’d only been shapes amid that thick, alluring darkness. Swimming along the margins. Just fuck-stains. Worth sneering at but not worth a damn.

Two policemen ran from across the street with guns drawn. Big men mounted motorcycles that sputtered and roared away. Jack watched them. Let me taste some of that thrill. Filled head to toe with a liquid envy igniting a quick rage somewhere at his center, at the source of feeling, but blooming now into something brighter, manic, and un-evil.

Amid the gathering crowd, Jack found Mira and gripped her shoulders and kissed her eyes and ears, and she said, “This isn’t what I’d wanted to see.”

Jack had wanted it though. He’d wanted something. This was the thing, now.

But he wanted to lean down and touch the boy, but couldn’t. Touch his cheek, search his eyes, maybe even steal his hat.

You couldn’t see his face. That was the horrible thing. You couldn’t discover the appropriate expression worn by the freshly self-murdered. Jack yanked a handkerchief out of his back pocket, hacked a wad of bile into it, and vanished into the crowd. Behind him, Mira shouldered her way through these roiling bodies, surrounded by their huge, rabid white eyes.

She caught Jack by the arm and he turned and she asked if he was all right and he said, “There’s something bad in that vodka.”

Years later, Mira recalled the story in alternative historical terms: the boy was kind to them, and thanked them for their concern.

“I’m an orphan,” he said. “Seems like you’d be real good folks but I think it’s too late for me, really.”

“Would you like to ride along with us, then?” Jack said. “We’ve been through hard times ourselves, Mira and me.”

“We save lives,” Mira said. “We practically make a living out of it.”

“Some little boy,” the kid said, “is going to be lucky.”

He touched Mira, touched her right where the hospitable womb might be.

This is exactly how Mira would recall it, years later.

Years and years.

In the motel room outside Rapid City, they couldn’t shake it. Jack felt guilty to be so thrilled. He’d never seen anything like it. He pulled out his phone and played some AC/DC. Mira’s face went bone-pale and she tucked it between her knees, sitting on the edge of the bed, and she said, “I’d seen a cat caught on fire by some neighborhood boys. Seen Mom get whipped to an inch of her life. But this is bad. We’re not coming back from this.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with us,” Jack said. “I mean us-us. They still let you smoke in motels here. I love that shit. The roads are empty. There’s no Walmart, Target, or Mickey D’s. It’s like we’re back in some better time.”

“You can smoke in motels anywhere,” she said. “That other shit’s here too. Got your vacation goggles on.”

“Like I was saying. I think I’ve got that rotten gene.”

“You think?”

“I must’ve been dulling it out for years,” he said. “Which side of the family you think it comes from?”

“Let’s not,” Mira said. She wore cowboy boots, jeans, and a teal bikini top. “Let’s hit the pool.”

“That could do us some good. I bet it’s closed.”

“You wouldn’t sneak in with me? Or, what, we don’t do things like that anymore?”

She laughed, and Jack didn’t like the sound of it.

“It’s an indoor pool,” he said. “No fence to jump. Got to have a key.”

He poured her a Dixie cup of Seagram’s. He kissed her neck. He bit her ear.

He said, “I’m sorry. You’d asked me about it. I don’t care. You’re always wanting to know everything and I don’t even like talking about it. Nothing’s happened to me.”

“Except tonight,” she said.

“That didn’t happen to me.”

“It happened to us. But you don’t ask how I feel. Like, ever. Even when I bring up Kurt you just change the subject.”

“Kurt the football lover.”

“They all watch football,” she told him. “I mean, this one time—I’ll tell you, okay?—I’d cheered when Kurt’s team lost, you know, just to fuck with him? Bad idea. Crimson Tide, man. ‘Bama fans are all a bunch of fucking psychopaths. He’d been drinking all day. He just looked at me and said, ‘Here’s what happens. Here’s what happens.’ And, like, had me on the floor, quicker than that. ‘I used to have to pick a switch,’ he told me. Like his Mom made him get a switch off a tree so she could whip his ass? Whatever. Kurt just fucking hated me. It wasn’t the football. But yeah, he made me do that. He made me pick a switch off a tree.”

She kept going: “Well, I think that was another time. But it’s all blurred together. Took me out there like you would a little kid. Pretty tree in the front yard. I loved that tree. Fucking god. Imagine being somebody’s neighbor and looking out the window, and this couple’s standing under a tree and she’s all pointing at it like, ‘How about this one? This one looks pretty good.’ Just like I was his kid or something. I hope people don’t do that shit to their kids anymore. Sometimes I’ve got to wonder, though, if I had kids. If I could? You don’t ever think you’d hit your kids. But at the same time, I don’t know what it’s like to have them.”

“You really let him do that?” Jack said.

“You can’t be serious,” she said. “You really can’t. That’s how you respond? Wow.”

She cloaked herself in a tie-dyed beach towel, opened the door, and disappeared.

Alone now, Jack parted the curtain and peered at the sky. Stars so close and sparkling everywhere like he’d never seen before, and like he’d never see again, a billion little white fires.

He might read about the boy’s death in the next day’s local paper. Might feel famous, for he’d played a role in a young man’s last gasp at a place called Rattlesnake Knights.

He went outside, looked through the frosted indoor pool window and watched her blurred and colorful shape swim. Her cowboy boots stood atop the diving board. She swam the butterfly across electric blue water. She’d kicked in the pool house door. Torn the Master Lock bracket off some busted, splintered wood. Mira still possessed that fire. Jack now had lost it altogether.

He opened the door, and the chlorine burned his eyes before he even got in. Then he waded into this very warm, very blue water.

“Butterfly your way on over to me,” he told her, but she swam farther away. The deep end. She closed her eyes and let herself sink.

He called her name. Again and again. All over the dark, wood-paneled walls and ceiling the water’s light reflected little bright, rapidly wriggling turquoise snakes. He felt it again. Filled again with a hot liquid, fear mingled with mute rage, a wild writhing under suffocation. She’d been down there testing her lungs for, well, he didn’t know how long.

Mira bent her knees, lifted her arms, and propelled to the surface.

“You scared me to death.”

“You love being scared,” she said.

He swam over, reached for the diving board, and held onto its edge, resting there. Better now. He plucked its corner. It rattled and sprung and popped her cowboy boots.

“You get those wet,” she said. “I’ll kill you.”

He did it again. A boot dropped, but he caught it, tossed it, and it smacked the tile pool-house wall. He threw the other one.

“You can trust me,” he said.

“Kill you,” she said, and she moved into him and wrung his body and kissed him hard.

“If we fucked right now,” he said, “what difference would it make, like, in the long run?”

“It wouldn’t,” she said. “But it makes a difference now.”

This, here it is, the body of water, Mira shedding down to bare skin. For Jack, this confluence of joy, pain, release, and finally comfort beyond heaven, would be everything—a very brief everything that just wouldn’t be enough. He wanted his entire body to taste a needle.

They finished and sat at the edge of the pool until the windows changed to bright, dewy gray with morning light. They hadn’t stayed up all night like this, not since in the beginning. Those all-night conversations in the early days before you start wearing each other out. Mira fell asleep, finally, her feet still dipped in the bright blue water, and then suddenly Jack knew he’d been wrong about everything. He couldn’t see the future. It was so likely, he thought now, that amid their time, past and present, they’d regarded each other as mere absurdities, necessary for a while but inessential, and that this might be one of the great tragedies of their lives. Maybe he ought to just leave, cut ties and break clean. Or he could dive into the shallow end, grasping at some colossally human sensation. Three feet of water and bang. See if she’d wake up, dive in and pull him out, cradle his wounded head and whisper something: something about the road westward where some good change had occurred, words of truth rolling off her tongue like rubies he could pocket. But he would simply wait. Wait for Mira to awaken. Through the morning. Against the pain of fresh light streaming in. Early risers arriving for a swim. Parents and children.

Thanks for tuning into Pedal Steel. Quotes herein are sourced from conversations with the author, and photos are all courtesy of Lee Johnson and County Highway/Panamerica.

Buy Brett a Beer

Lee Clay Johnson, a young author of Southern Gothic fiction, was having a tough time getting his second novel picked up. Johnson’s agent shopped it for about two years, to every publishing house she could think of. It was roundly rejected with the common refrain, It’s not the right time. Late in 2024, Johnson lost his identical twin brother, Evan David Johnson, a carpenter and fiddle player. “Two weeks after his death,” Johnson recalls, “after I had built his casket with a construction buddy and buried him, [my agent] reached out and told me that she’d hesitated to pile on difficult news at a terrible time but the final publishing option had rejected my novel.”

Johnson wrote his old editor, Gary Fisketjon, to break the bad news. Gary wrote back, “I’ve got a weird idea to tell you about.”

In 2016, Knopf published Johnson’s debut Nitro Mountain, a seared-and-blackened Southern noir. The book was not a loss for Knopf. It was critically acclaimed and won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. But it was a vicious, darkly comic romp into a Virginia nightmarescape of neon and bar bands and labyrinthine Appalachian wilds. It must’ve snuck in before the Trump era sent Big Publishing—at least amid the cloistered pantheon of “literary” imprints—into a years-long tailspin of rural-phobic damage control. Just speculating.

Knopf turned down Johnson’s follow-up, Bloodline, now published by Panamerica Books, the book-making arm of County Highway, as its inaugural release on Independence Day, 2025.

It’s a more ambitious novel than the lean-and-mean Nitro, but it’s not an inaccessible pursuit. Rather, it’s a straight-shooter with a clean, cinematic structure told in Johnson’s rhythmic Tennessee lilt, puckish wit and bursts of restrained lyrical brilliance. A gifted up-and-comer writes a richer follow-up to his debut and his publisher snubs it with nary a clear explanation. What happened? [agent or editor who’s reading this, thinking: it's the market, stupid]. Fair enough.

“A lot of editors we sent it to said they loved the book,” Johnson recalls, “but it wasn’t right for our current cultural climate.”

Bloodline’s central character, Winston “Wins-a-ton” Alcorn, is a con-man turned Dixie-first politician in a small town in Middle Tennessee, with an overlarge rubber prosthesis for a hand, always shouting through a bullhorn, even in his home, at his wife and children, during dinner. In a berserko turn of gothic Twainism, Wins-a-ton (because he wins a ton) winds up holding riverine rallies off the transom of a moribund riverboat, conjuring rabid fandom from the town’s dispossessed working class. It’s a tale of American demagoguery gone gonzo, a Penn Warren-Fellini chimera, and it’s puzzling why this narrative conceit could be discerned by an acquisitions editor as right wing-coded or unworthy of our current cultural climate. If anything, Johnson’s book feels timely yet timeless (a good goal for the writer), a rare Southern book in the tradition of the grotesque dark comedy and regionalism practiced by Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews and Barry Hannah. Maybe that was the issue.

Johnson’s debut was edited by Fisketjon, who departed Knopf in 2019. Fisketjon emerged in the ‘80s, usurping Gordon Lish’s role as the man behind new wave fiction—founding Vintage Contemporaries and, finally, in the 1990s, championing works like The Secret History and American Psycho and ushering Cormac McCarthy from obscurity into literary celebrity, allowing the new fiction to expand and breathe beyond Lish’s excesses in minimalism. Arguably the last rock star editor in American letters, Fisketjon’s departure from Knopf left a void in the industry. Johnson quips, “Gary’s the last editor who actually edits.” For about five years, until Panamerica, the editor who’d most needed to be editing was out of work. However, when, a few years ago, Johnson asked him if he still had clout in New York publishing circles, Fisketjon told him, “I’ve still got a groundhog hole in the big barn.”

Meanwhile, as American writerly institutions fell in lock-step with claptivist fashion—burning hotter than a two-dollar pistol from Trump’s election through the pandemic—the writers David Samuels and Walter Kirn dreamed up a magazine called County Highway. Samuels and Kirn conceived of a heterodox quarterly fashioned like a nineteenth century newspaper, heavy on Americana vibes coupled with literary rigor, kind of like a trucker-speeder’s N+1. Their mission was to “build a haven for the American literary voice” that captures “the spirit of the open road and the breadth of the American experience outside big cities.”

There probably aren’t a lot of folks hauling semis down the interstate reading County Highway (or maybe there are!) but that’s not the point of the whole endeavor. The point is that a lot of modern consumers of literature—let’s say, between the ages of 35 and dead—came up reading Larry Brown and Joy Williams and Oxford American circa twenty years ago and they’re kind of wondering where the hell it all went.

This is why pubs like County Highway—launched in 2023, they’ve amassed about 20,000 subscribers—are starting to emerge. These are not right-wing venues. There is a strain of what you might call literary libertarianism that’s come into play here, but this spirit means something far different in the context of American letters, a now-fresh conceit by which ideology—which obviously shall be expressed in the work itself—does not intrude upon the brick-by-brick composition of long-form investigative and imaginative prose.

If this sentiment sounds kind of outdated, we can chalk that up to aesthetic preferences. And that’s fine. There’s a change happening now in the discourse over American letters, and if you follow the burgeoning keyboard literati you’ll behold debates about the value of realist fiction and minimalism vs. maximalism and the “MFA style” and the Gordon Lish era, the Fisketjon era, the New Romanticism; you have your Alt Lit folks and autofictionists and Classics Geeks and psychobilly poetry and dive bar dispatches and 15,000-word author profiles and folks rallying about unsung self-published works of wildly varying quality. People who love to write and read, online or IRL, are starting to band together. People are talking about literature again, and they are demanding it. Sure, you have your bad actors. You have your man-babies, your enraged pseudo-intellectuals. They’re here, ripping and roaring, and that’s a good thing. But if you peer broadly enough you’ll notice that most people who dwell amid the fringes of mainstream book culture are simply hungry for great writing with intentional, well-crafted prose that isn’t necessarily fastened to megalopolitan milieus. It really is a reasonable ask. Even in our current cultural climate.

Twentieth century realism was not a most inclusive movement, and a new literary revolution today will have to look different. We need stories from all Americans, but without the sort of typecasting lampooned in Percival Everett’s classic novel Erasure—stories from every walk of life fathomable, told with honesty, and without shame or self-censorship, about what it’s like to live in America today.

One figure desirous of this movement is , a Cuban American fiction and culture writer who attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and twisted some britches over a 2022 interview with the literary journal Hobart, in which he took mainstream publishing professionals to task for shunning and otherizing working-class voices. Some might characterize him as a provocateur of letters, and amongst his detractors are folks who forgot that writers are allowed to be funny. (To be fair, he was a little rough on waspy white women.) Perez, unalone, wishes for a return to form in American realist fiction; not a full-on coup, just a chiseled notch in the culture for emerging writers who work in the gritty, plainspoken tradition of Cathedral and Rock Springs. He’s now the Associate Editor of County Highway’s Panamerica Books imprint, of which Gary Fisketjon is the curator and Literary Editor. Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline is Panamerica’s first book.

Winston Alcorn drives his family down from Kentucky deep into Middle Tennessee to reclaim his ancestral land, to get back “what’s his,” although his claim to it was wrought by hearsay from his mother, who showed him a statue of Confederate Colonel John Hunt Morgan atop his horse Black Bess, telling little Winston, “That’s who we’re from.” As he grew into an adult, Wins-a-ton, in his research, couldn’t prove this heritage but “wanted it to be true so badly, felt it in his bones so deeply, that he decided it couldn’t be false … after visiting that statue, he could hear the hooves pounding down the street like the tapping fingers of some impatient god.”

Winston’s increasing delusions and “far-memory”—phantom Civil War era visions he remembers more vividly than his wedding day—send him on a vengeful quest, dragging his wife Mandy and their two sons along the rough and rowdy way. They basecamp in their van at the periphery of a sawmill that sits upon Alcorn’s rightful estate, and Winston promptly gets a job at the mill—and elects to get his hand sawn off in an “accident” and settles with the mill’s owner, Miss Becka, for the property. Thus begins Winston’s transformation into a rubber-handed, bullhorn-wielding American carny of the lowest order, igniting a tragicomic saga that draws from All the Kings Men, Wise Blood, the ribald Civil War stories of Airships, and the narrative horsepower one can expect from the author of Nitro Mountain.

Johnson’s debut often reads like a lean, page-turning thriller, but Bloodline is his flight into the empyrean of twentieth century-style Southern fiction, what Barry Hannah would call a “ripper in the old sense.” It succeeds not only in this regard, but in blazing a path for such a novel—one with a romance for the American interior and a nuanced moral center that respects the reader’s intelligence—to be relevant in our era, to be refashioned in the image of our new, weirder America; one more demanding of our faculties, let’s hope, for discerning beauty out of the berserk, a novel that can lay a little groundwork and wheel this feeling farther down the line.

Johnson says the novel “revealed itself to me slowly, as sometimes they do, over the course of many difficult years.”

Talks started between Fisketjon and the staff at County Highway, who’d already been mulling the idea of a book imprint. A legendary editor out of the trade brings his most promising new talent—a Tennessean first generation college graduate and bluegrass musician—to a team of veteran writers who’ve started the only literary old rag going (County Highway’s tagline is “America’s Only Newspaper”). So you’ve got a Twenty-first Century artists’ salon with mud flaps. Very good. The story of Panamerica Books reads, as does the shared aesthetic vision of all parties involved, like a bit of a throwback to some older, more vigorous era in American letters. (Fisketjon line-edited Johnson’s manuscript by hand.)

But this movement has an energy and youthful verve to it, with Mr. Perez as Fisketjon’s editorial associate and a young up-and-comer in Southern Gothic letters with a barnstorming new book. This is not a dinosaur fart.

“After Gary reached out [to County Highway],” Lee says, “we were turbo-charged, baby.” It took about six months for Johnson’s book to go into print. “These are some of the hardest working people I know.”

And there’s a little rock’n’rolling here: County Highway and Panamerica’s Summer 2025 tour is a thirty-five-location, cross-country ramble, making good on their Americana tack and grassroots publishing spirit—bringing the show to Nashville, Tennessee, Oxford, Mississippi, and Missoula, Montana, among many places, driving in a logoed van.

People are showing up. “Every stop was full,” Lee says, cooling his tubes after the tour’s Southern leg. “A common refrain was that people were dying for kick-ass literature … people are so fucking hungry for exactly this.”

There’s something to be said for a new literary movement that does not exist wholly online in 2025. A small, grassroots collective with legs, backed by professionals with miles and taste and know-how. To certain journalists and aspiring think-piecers, contemporary fiction is bereft of honest stories about “male isolation” and our constantly living online, who’d like to see some fictional examinations of the sexless and aggrieved staring at screens for three hundred pages, novels about our hyper-speed age, the dangers of AI. These are all very real things. But if you’ve spent any time living in or traveling through flyover states you’ll notice that America is still a vast and rugged and strange, largely rural and suburban country of souls shuttling about, of working people and crooks and runaways trying to make a life amid landscapes into which one can still get lost, lost on small town avenues and lost in their own backyards and lost amongst their families, their neighbors, their dreams.

It’s tough to tackle the present in American fiction without some acknowledgement of Faulkner’s adage, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” There’s a sort of throughline connecting our best work, ornamented with the concerns that best connect us: place, an observance of our landscapes and the tremors of history therein, and the reinvention of the self amid those vacuums. Deep into Johnson’s novel, Wins-a-ton’s “far-memory’s been kicking in and bringing up all the old stories he thought he’d forgotten for good. Though maybe they’re not done with him yet.”

Bloodline’s hero, Miss Becka—Alcorn’s chief antagonizer and confidant to one of his wayward sons, both of whom are cut loose on their own transformative pilgrimages—leaves her home, while holding a conversation with her dead father, and she “walks along the forest trail stabilizing herself with a hickory walking stick … the river sparkling and turning below.” She finds the “ancient white oak, many arm-widths wide,” and hears birdsong, “a high-pitched piping. She looks around but doesn’t see it, can only hear it. She hums one of their tunes, imagines the blood harmony vibrating like two tightly wound wires.”

Johnson’s book, and Panamerica’s ethos, are wound as such, seeking to create an environment of language for new readers that’s just about as past-haunted as it ought to be. For what it’s worth, County Highway, over its heretofore brief lifespan, has filled its pages with everything from profiling UFO conspiracists to lengthy reports on Taylor Swift’s ERAS Tour, the ubiquity of AI image-making and roadside museums off reservation highways. If Panamerica, cruising beyond the promise of Johnson’s book, can stick to this blood harmony, and offer an eclectic oeuvre that’s as expansive, strange, and freewheeling as this still-young country—whose identity is wrought by its crisis thereof—then this endeavor should work out just fine.

“It could be revolutionary,” Johnson says. His enthusiasm’s been pretty hard-won. If anything, it’s of a piece with some new thing, of which there are many. As he says of the band that got together to bring Bloodline into this world, and perhaps of others: “Merry are the builders.”

I pulled my copy of Airships off the shelf this morning. It’d gone top of mind again but I haven’t read a Barry Hannah story in maybe a few years. There was a time when I was so taken with his voice that it was very dangerous for me as a writer. In my early twenties, I’d gone full blown imitator, and imitating Barry Hannah is not an easy thing to do.

It was just another discovery in the possibilities of language — an astonishment, a new revelation, the gift that keeps on giving for the fiction writer: you can do a lot of shit with this medium.

It’s the same thing when you first read Jesus’ Son or Suttree or countless others, by which you’re delighted to discover prose taking on new forms. However, it’s best to take bits of this stuff and slide them in your toolbox. Variety and moderation is key, and you really will spoil your own potential if you get too drunk off one brand.

When I’d gone to grad school, I studied under a couple of writers whose work I very much admire, but they really did not care for Barry Hannah, and the conceit was something like this: this guy is full of shit. In fact, David Gates once told me, “You’re much less full of shit than your boy Barry.” Which I guess made me feel pretty good.

The full-of-shit thing: that’s fair. I’ve half-expected to age into the same sort of writer, repulsed, to a degree, by what I’d just call a kind of “prose funny business.” A lack of sincerity, a decorative approach to composition that’s often — if done wrong — a lazy cop-out masquerading as lyricism; and then there’s the risk of not taking your characters seriously.

I’ve slipped into my own voice long since I went through my big Barry phase, but as much as I admire extreme polish and some measure of austerity in American literary fiction, it seems like I’ll probably never grow out of my own funny business. But that’s been a happy discovery amid the undulant, forever-identity crises writers suffer. At some point, you’ve gotta accept who you are. And I think maybe I absorbed enough Barry that he’s become a part my Writers’ DNA. As another mentor once told me, “When you’re a fiction writer, you get to pick your grandparents.”

When I took up Airships this morning, I opened it to a random page, to a random paragraph, which I’ll commonly do with books I treasure, have read and re-read and re-read. Page 76, the story: “Return to Return.”

This one was just as good as any paragraph I could’ve come across. I wasn’t disappointed. I haven’t grown cynical-skeptical, evidently. Almost every sentence here is wildly original, and easy on the ears. I might as well have been listening to one of my favorite bands.

I’ve heard personal anecdotes from people who knew Barry, and there’s a consensus that, just as a person, outside his fiction, Barry was a colossally funny human being. And for that I believe Barry wrote in his own voice. He wasn’t phony. And his talent radiated from humor as its epicenter.

“He dragged himself from one peak of cowardice to the next and began wearing sunglasses … Levaster’s body left him and was gathered into the body of French.”

This is not something you can teach in a writing program, and it’s probably not something you can learn as an autodidact. This is delightful to the ear, complex or at least warped (he started wearing sunglasses because of his cowardice?), and entirely idiosyncratic — “was gathered into the body” — and, as often is the case in Hannah’s fiction, almost mysteriously hilarious (yes, he did start wearing sunglasses because of his cowardice).

A bit of trivia: the story “Return to Return” was gathered into — along with a few others from Airships — his cobbled-together 1983 novel The Tennis Handsome, a sort of tragic follow-up to the divine and vulgar genius poem-novella Ray (1980). This was when Hannah started to lose some of his mojo to alcoholism in the ‘80s, before roaring back in the ‘90s with Bats Out of Hell and High Lonesome. There are flights of brilliance in The Tennis Handsome, most of which appear in the sections salvaged from Airships. But the cover of my copy is very alluring, and it’s a good read for the Hannah completist:

Anyway, it’s good to not fully grow out of funny business. And by “prose funny business” . . . I guess you could define it more broadly as anything that comes off as inauthentic. I have a sort of goofball schtick in my personal life, and therefore I have a sort of goofball schtick in my own fiction, sometimes, but I have good, talented friends who will call me out on my bullshit if need be. But if they said they laughed out loud at a line, or even a little in their head, then I’ll let the funny business do its work. The problem, always, is that it has to be good. And Barry Hannah just happened to be very good at being good.

Nothing like an authentic load of bullshit. One to cleanse the palate after, say, Kent Haruf or Raymond Carver (who could be very funny, read “Feathers”). Come to think of it, a lot of our best writers are fucking funny. Denis Johnson. Funny. Flannery O’Connor. Very funny. Good fiction’s much like stand-up comedy, in which a good line ought to land with a wallop, and it’s the incisive commentary on characters, on human beings, that renders much of Hannah’s work — and Flannery’s, et al — so humorous, and that’s because people are strange as hell. And mostly full of shit.

Thanks for tuning into Pedal Steel. This story was initially published in a journal called Fiddleblack. This journal closed its doors, but they had a wonderful, gritty aesthetic and published some work by horror legend Clive Barker. This isn’t a horror story, although I am raising it from the dead.

SAVED

By mid-morning I was in Chattanooga, eating breakfast at City Café, where they start serving liquor at eight AM. I had a Gordon’s and grapefruit with my corned beef hash, ordered a few more, caught a buzz and figured I’d stay in town a little longer. Tennessee was playing Florida that afternoon, so why not catch that somewhere. Maybe I’d still make it to Cocoa Beach by midnight, could be a job and a girl there for me—I’d kept telling myself this, and I’d started thinking it was true.

My Jeep was loaded. Anything I wasn’t able to fit had gone in the trash. Jessie would’ve told me to donate the excess to the Samaritan Center, sell the furniture or something. But no, I just kept a Rubbermaid full of my best clothes—with one of those Wrangler snap-buttoned shirts with rose vines snaking across the breast—some bedding and a box of old CDs and records and paperbacks I’d probably never read. I had $632.73 in my bank account. After City Café I had $612.20.

I left there and parked on Rossville Avenue, put on my sharpest coat, a tweed houndstooth blazer I got on sale at Dillard’s, a slick pair of Ray-Bans Jessie bought me one birthday and headed to T-Bones. The air was fall-cool, and you could see Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, spotted red and gold.

A man walked into the bar tugging this little Mexican woman by the wrist. He had a soul patch and a Tampa Bay Buccaneers jersey under a long, oilcloth coat, a fresh-looking pair of shitkickers with thorny rose-vine stitching up the sides—just like my shirt. So I knew he was cool. I sat at the end of the bar by the window, watching the leaves fly around. There was a big flatscreen TV above the liquor bottles, showing the pregame, but I just couldn’t quit looking at all those leaves. I ordered a Coors and thought of Cocoa Beach, the hotels, seafood restaurants and good bars with daiquiri dispensers, all different colors and flavors.

My phone buzzed. It was D’Arcy King. I’d worked with her at the marina in Loudon, welding those big galvanized skeletons of boathouses. Make it okay? the screen said. I put the phone back in my pocket. I didn’t need any of that. I’d taken up with D’Arcy when things got real bad and the Wellbutrin wasn’t cutting it. She was the one who’d convinced me to get myself looked at. I’d already tried religion. I’d gotten saved back when I was a boy, but I didn’t stay that way. D’Arcy King, she was a respite. But when Jessie found out about us, she came down to the marina and caused a scene. That was the end of my job and both women.

Driving down from Loudon I’d thrown that bottle of pills out the window, right off that bridge crossing the Hiwassee River. Let some sorry bastard snag the thing fishing, might do him some good.

In T-Bones, that man and his Mexican woman sat next to me, and he ordered two shots of Patrón. But the bartender told him he couldn’t serve her, so the man settled for just the one shot and the Mexican woman screamed at the bartender, saying he was a fag and that she wasn’t drunk and so forth and the bartender told her he’d have her thrown out quicker than shit through a duck and I lifted a hand and said, “It’s all right, chief, we’ll keep her in line,” and I winked at the man in the rose-vine shitkickers. The man asked me if I’d really just said I was going to keep his lady in line, and I said, “Well, I guess I did.” His lady dropped her head on the bartop.

“I met her yesterday at Chester Frost,” the man said. “Taking her back with me to Tampa.”

I told the man I was Florida-bound too.

“She’s the best lay I ever had and she’s never seen salt water,” he said.

This man was from out of town, but he clearly had people in Chattanooga. The bartender said, “Brent, next time you drag a sad case in here—”

“How about this,” I said. “We’ll take her out for some fresh air.”

He said it wasn’t such a bad idea, and I introduced myself. Since we were both headed for Florida, might have something to talk about.

Out in the cool air, on Rossville Avenue, she stood between Brent and me, our arms all locked in a three person-chain. Then Brent said, “Oh Lord, Oh Jesus, God help me—she’s pissed herself. Here we go.”

“First time you’ve had a lady friend piss herself?” I said.

“I don’t know where she lives,” he said. “I got to get her home, wherever that is. Get her a new set of pants.”

“She won’t know how to get there, not right now,” I said. “There’s gotta be a Wal-Mart somewhere. Somewhere with pants.”

“Ain’t paying for any pants,” he said. “And we gotta get the panties too. I’m not having anyone with wet panties. Are we? Are we, Ruth? We’re not having anyone with wet panties. She doesn’t have any money.”

“One thing is, my Jeep’s loaded up,” I said.

“That’s all right, I got room in the truck.”

This was an old lifted 1980s F-150, brown, with an aluminum cap. Two guitar cases sat in the truck bed, plus a Fender amplifier and a single duffel bag. Brent told Ruth, “All right, in you go.” He got behind her, took her by the hips and just guided her up into the truck bed. He got her belly flat on the tailgate, and then took her by the ankles and slid her on in there.

“Jesus,” I said. “She can pile in front with us.”

“Not when she’s wet like that,” he said.

I went over to my Jeep and grabbed a quilt. I asked Ruth to please get out of that truck bed, and she looked over at Brent. Brent shook his head and walked off, and I helped her slide out and wrapped her in the quilt. “Here,” I said. “This’ll keep your seat from getting wet.”

“I can’t handle any of this,” Brent said, and he stuck his nose in the air and breathed in real deep. “All right, good Samaritan. You win. You see that, Ruth? He wins. He won one for you. What have you won today?”

We drove into that low built part of town near the Georgia line where all the Mexicans live. Ruth kept pointing to this house, and that house. Her eyes were just glowing with tears. She was young, maybe twenty. There was a crescent scar along the side of her neck as though she’d had some big operation.

She pointed at a squat pink stucco house on a corner with the sprinkler going in front, and a little boy and girl, neither of them any taller than my hip, were racing around through the sprays. She told us to stop here, this was it.

We brought her along a beaten dirt path to the front steps, and she banged on the door. A man in a purple dress shirt unbuttoned to the belly opened the door and said: “Baby girl.” He was bald headed and had a fat jaw framed in a square goatee. He couldn’t have been much older than Ruth. Brent and I introduced ourselves. His name was Hector. Hector asked us to sit, and then he led Ruth through a hall into the back of the house.

“This isn’t my fault,” Brent said. “I didn’t get her in the shape she’s in.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” I said. “Old Hector looks like a real nice cat.”

Hector came back into the living room with three Budweisers. I heard the shower going in back, and through the doorway into the kitchen, I saw a woman in a pink bathrobe shuffling back and forth. “She doesn’t speak English,” Hector said. Brent turned the Budweiser bottle up and set it down half-empty on the coffee table.

Hector told Brent, “My sister, she’s got a problem. She lives in Patton Towers; it’s rough in there, man. I give her money sometimes, but she just gets drunk.”

“She’s young,” I said.

“I think she’s on the spectrum,” Hector said. “Something’s bad loose in there.”

“I wasn’t trying to take advantage,” Brent said. “She’s sweet as can be. You talk like a white man.”

Ruth came in wrapped in a towel, long hair combed all to the side, rich and wet and deep-black. She kissed Hector’s bald head. “You ought to nap real quick,” he told her.

She shook her head. “I get drunk quick. I recover quick. I have a fast system.”

“Get back there and put something on,” he said. “Alma’s got plenty to pick from.”

Ruth kissed Hector again. Brent said, “Hi buttercup,” but she went in back. Brent told Hector, “Know why she likes me? I’m a musician.”

“Hey, I play, too” Hector said. “It’s open mic night at Tito’s in Fort Oglethorpe. Come out and show us what you got. What’s your story?”

“Traveling,” I said. “Cocoa Beach. Gonna live by the ocean.”

“Now there’s something,” he said. “Miami. Pretty ladies, all at mojito bars. What do you call those hotels? Deco. Pricey though, if you want to live good.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe later for Miami.”

Ruth came back in, denim dress on with little bitty sunflowers for buttons, and sat on the lounger, running her hands over her knees. Hector’s kids came in from the sprinklers, dripping wet, and Hector’s wife called out in Spanish from the kitchen. The kids went in there with her. Hector called out to her in Spanish, and Alma stood in the doorway, hands fastened to her hips and screaming.

“Little chilly out there, playing in the sprinklers,” Brent said.

“My kids don’t get sick,” Hector said.

“Adorable,” I said.

“Ruth and me, we were born here,” Hector said. “But Alma speaks no English. And I like that.” Alma was still screaming, and Hector walked in back.

“I think she’s a mail-order bride,” Ruth said. “If Hector could afford one.”

Brent patted his knee and said, “Come here, buttercup.”

“You’re in trouble,” Ruth told him.

Hector came back wearing a yellow Western shirt with red snap-buttons, black jeans and cowboy boots. “Let’s head down there,” he said. “Have a drink, play a set. Got room in that truck?”

We piled into Brent’s truck, Hector in back with the guitars, and rode back to Rossville Avenue, where I found my Jeep. I put on my rose-vine snap-button shirt. And when I got back to the truck, I heard Hector telling Brent, “She’s not riding with you man, I’m riding with you.”

This Hector, he’d had the most wonderful smile you’ve ever seen. I had a great feeling just then that old Hector had it all figured out, and this made me feel better about me, though I can’t tell you why.

Ruth loaded in with me, and we followed Brent’s truck onto I-75, snaking alongside the Tennessee River, heading for the Georgia line. The hills beyond, big and smoky, heavy wind out there and leaves still blowing all around.

I told Ruth, “You can sleep if you want.”

“I don’t need to sleep,” she said. “I’m fine now.”

“That Hector, he must take good care of you,” I said. “Brent, well.”

“I think that fuck slipped something in my gin and tonic last night,” she said. “He was playing his guitar at Parkway, and I thought he was cute. He was singing the Eagles. I take you for a bad boy too.”

“I’m just traveling,” I said.

She leaned her head against the window, and her mouth fell wide open. She snored. I turned the radio up. I could just peel off and take her with me. We could live by the ocean, and she’d be happy, and she’d see I’m not bad. She’d see it real quick. I’m all about living good.

My phone rang. It was Jessie, and I also had another text from D’Arcy King: Where the hell are u now? I set the phone on silent and hid it in the console. I’d planned on not paying the bill this month. I just wasn’t going to pay the goddamned thing. They’d eventually turn off my service, which was the whole idea.

I stopped for gas when we reached Fort Oglethorpe. Brent’s truck just kept racing along and out of sight, and I asked the convenience store clerk for directions to Tito’s. It was getting dark out. The gas cost me sixty dollars and thirty-one cents. So now I had $541.89 left in the account. I could still make a start in Cocoa with five hundred dollars.

The building looked like an airport hangar, nothing much else around; and the letters glowed red, one by one, in sequence—T-I-T-O-apostrophe-S—and burned out and started up again.

“Wake up, baby girl,” Hector said. He banged the passenger side window of the Jeep. I stood with Brent smoking a cigarette. Brent hadn’t said a word. He looked pretty pale.

“I could see how you might fall for a girl like that,” I told him.

Ruth opened the car door and got out, and Hector threw an arm around her. Brent stamped his cigarette and headed for the door.

We went in. “Where’s the stage?” Brent said. We sat at the bar and Hector bought us a round of well-tequila shots.

Brent leaned over to me and said, “I think that fat sonofabitch wants to kill me.”

“Hell,” I said. “The man just bought us a drink. Cheers.”

Hector wrung his arm around Brent, smiled with that wonderful beam-of-light toothiness, and said, “It’s you and me, son. And my buddy Gaston.” His buddy Gaston was leaned against the wall beneath a yellow neon Corona sign. He lifted a hand and blew a stream of cigarette smoke through his nostrils. He had gold-capped incisors and half his neck was a tattoo of an engine block. He had a Chevy tattoo on his forearm.

“I think I’ve decided to sit this one out,” Brent said. “Y’all can go at it without me.”

Ruth took shot after shot and I told her, “You oughta slow it down, baby girl.”

“Only Hector gets to call me that,” she said.

“Wish I had a brother like Hector,” I said.

“You’re a little innocent, aren’t you?”

“You just keep on with that notion,” I said.

“You getting on the road tonight?”

“Possibility.”

“You’re really not a bad guy,” she said. “Let’s get drunk and drive all the way to Florida. Take me with you. I’ve got nothing here. Fucking zero.”

“Get me drunker and I might consider it.”

Hector started ordering more shots and said, “Not playing tonight. The goddamned joint’s dying out. Gaston here wants to go for a ride.”

“I don’t want to do that,” Brent said.

“Have another,” Hector said. “Drink it.”

“I know a good spot on Lake Spinnaker,” Gaston said. “Past the battlefield. We’ll get a coolerful. Ever seen the battlefield, Brent?”

Hector bought Brent another tequila shot, and then another.

Out in the parking lot, Brent loaded himself into the truck bed while Hector and Gaston watched. “You oughta take it easy,” I told him.

Hector wasn’t smiling in that wonderful way anymore. The moon was out in full and Gaston’s gold incisors glinted in the dark. Hector told Brent to sit in the middle, and Brent handed over the keys. Ruth and I jumped in my Jeep. I knew now that Brent was not Hector’s favorite person on the planet. We got on the road and headed for the lake. I placed a palm on Ruth’s knee, and she kissed my neck, and I forgot about the boys in that truck.

Hector pulled into a Golden Gallon off Ringgold Road, and we followed them in. I checked my balance at the ATM. I’d spent thirty-seven dollars on drinks at Tito’s. Then I went back out and checked on Ruth. She was just looking out the window at black leaves flying up in big sprays.

Brent pumped gas into the truck, looking down at the concrete. A long, dark swath ran down the seat of his pants.

“My Lord, buddy,” I said. “I believe you pissed yourself.”

Hector and Gaston hobbled out of the convenience store with two Styrofoam coolers and a couple eighteen packs of Coors.

“Motherfucker pissed himself in the truck,” Hector said.

“It’s his truck,” Gaston said. “Like we give a shit.”

“There’s that quilt in there,” I said. “Maybe he ought to go home.”

“Nah,” Hector said. “He’s gonna wash himself in that lake, man. Get himself purified.”

We barreled down Powder Road, alongside some iron fencing, and beyond that was the Chickamauga Battlefield. You could see the old war cannons shining blackly out there on the field.

“They used to say the battlefield was haunted,” Ruth said. “We’d sneak inside every Halloween and camp out. I’d always wished we’d seen something. One time Hector and his friends dressed like ghosts and scared us. But that was the closest we ever got to anything happening.”

We drove along until the road got narrow, and there were only the shadows of trees, and Brent’s tail lights red in the dark. Through the trees, you saw bits of Lake Spinnaker in the moonlight. Hector pulled over into the mouth of a dirt road cut off by a steel gate. I parked behind. He got out and swung the gate open, then got back in the truck and drove on through. Ruth said, “Just stay put a minute.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.

“We could stop in Valdosta,” she said. “Stay in a hotel, be at the beach tomorrow afternoon.”

“I feel bad leaving Brent here,” I said.

“He got himself into this.”

“Starting to get the feeling they aren’t treating him all that well.”

“You must have a college education, honey. Just put it out of your mind.”

She leaned over and ran her tongue along my neck, and I touched that smooth scar along the side of hers. “How’d you get that?”

“I don’t really want to see what they do to him,” she said. “Quicker we get out of here, quicker you can take me to bed.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to see it either,” I said. “I don’t guess there’s any helping him—”

“Now there’s a good boy,” she said.

All the way down to Valdosta, we said filthy things to each other, and stayed loaded off the bottle of Lauder’s Scotch I kept beneath the seat. We’d drained it just before we pulled into the Day’s Inn.

It was four-thirty AM. The room was seventy-six dollars.

Ruth cut the lamp off and stripped down to her panties and bra and sat on the edge of the bed. “We’re out of drinks,” she said.

“I don’t know if I can keep spending all this money,” I said.

“What’s the matter, baby?”

“I just think we ought to be smart now, then better times in Florida.”

She peeled off her bra. “There’s a gas station just across the street,” she said. “Beer first, then me.”

When I got back from the convenience store, Ruth was passed out on the bed and snoring, her mouth hung open. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but I thought that maybe I could really love her. That maybe we could have a good time by the ocean, and be good together.

We woke up the next morning and made love—I was surprised to hear her call it that. She had me all over the bed, all over the room, everywhere. She showed me she could have power over me, and I couldn’t deal with that. Not heading south like this, the way I’d intended. It had to be me.

We checked out and had eggs and biscuits and gravy at a Cracker Barrel in Lake Park, Georgia. It cost $19.50, tip included. We bought beer in that town, and we hollered and toasted each other as we crossed the Florida line. We told Georgia and Tennessee Bye-bye and told the beach Here we come. We got drunk. We parked at a rest stop and made quick love on the stack of bedding, against the boxes of records and books. I drove on shirtless. Ruth stayed naked waist-down. We kept the windows open. The sun was out, the warm air streaming in.

I checked an ATM in Jasper, Florida, and had $396.39 left. And then I just tried not to think about it. We headed east toward Jacksonville.

I managed for a good while, not thinking about it. But Ruth fell asleep in the passenger seat, and I started having desperate ideas, like, Couldn’t there be some hand-of-God situation, in which you came upon the right person at the right time in the right place, someone of means, a lot of cash on him, wouldn’t it be easy? And then we could forget about it. He’d end up just fine. Honestly, we’d be laughing about it a year from now, having daiquiris on the sand, a big string of condos behind us, an airplane pulling a message behind it, like: Ruth, Will You Marry Me? But I’d never robbed anyone. I’d never even owned a firearm.

I looked at my phone. Another missed call from Jessie, another text from D’Arcy. All I want to know is r u safe. I stopped for gas, set my phone behind a tire, backed over it, and that was the end of that trouble.

“I can’t stand it in this car another fucking minute,” Ruth said. We were driving through Osceola National Forest on I-10, great swamplands and tall, naked trees flowing by, the sun high and blazing, no more wind, no more leaves blowing around out there.

“You’ve been unconscious the whole goddamn motherfucking drive,” I said. “I’m sorry honey. We’ll stop in Jacksonville. They got a beach.”

“We could get a start right there,” she said. “What’s the use in going any farther, if there’s a beach in Jacksonville? How much money you have?”

“Hell,” I said. “We might stay in Jacksonville a while.”

I left her at a big TA Travel Center, just outside Jacksonville. I’d sent her in with some cash to get chicken at Popeyes, and I stood by the Jeep and smoked a cigarette. There were tall palm trees around the TA Center, and nothing much else nearby. I stamped out the cigarette and drove off.

Later on, night had fallen, and I made it clear through Jacksonville and took US-1, the Dixie Highway, for the scenery, though the night was blacker than you’ve ever seen, so there was nothing really to look at. I stopped for a beer just outside St. Augustine. Tomorrow I’d be in Daytona, New Smyrna, then Cocoa. I’d just liked that name, Cocoa. But I could make it anywhere.

I drank a Coors and fed coins to the jukebox, and I wondered if Brent was okay. One thing is, Hector surely wouldn’t have to worry about his sister anymore. There wasn’t much money left, but I had everything I needed in the Jeep. I felt like I had all I’d ever want in life laid out for me. There were only a few others in the bar, truckers, I guess, and I bought a round for everybody. A fat man in a yellow cowboy hat with seashells glued to the hatband came up to me and said, “That’s a real nice shirt.” I had on my snap-button again, with the rose vines. He set the shot I’d bought on the bar top in front of me. “I don’t drink,” he said. “I just come here for the people. The talk. But I do thank you.”

“It’s nothing to me, friend.” I said.

“Big spender,” he said. “And just who might you be?”

“Just passing through,” I said.

“Well, all right then,” he said. “But you can’t be too careful. Lot of people out there want to take things from you. I seen it myself. You been saved?”

Now there was a question I hadn’t been asked in a long time. But I had the right answer. “First thing my momma did after she had me was get me saved.”

“Then you’re all set.”

I took the shot he’d given back. This bar had a Corona sign, with the neon palm tree. I set the empty glass on the bar top and paid and shook the man’s hand, the man who’d asked if I was saved or not. And I was. I stepped outside and cranked the ignition and got back out on the highway. I did start to feel bad about Ruth. But she was never part of the plan. She just happened. I hadn’t envisioned that woman, so I had to let her go. Because now all my visions were fixing to come true. There’d be another girl somewhere down the line. And Ruth would be all right. Somebody else would take up with her. A woman like that could start fresh. Find a way in her life. She was a lot like me.

I started “Puryear’s Southern Lit Jukebox” in February 2025 because I was curious about the newsletter format and the culture, and I had some ideas for nonfiction pieces that I didn’t think really fit into what’s out there, and obviously what’s great about platforms like Substack is you can write whatever you want—and people might actually read it.

Before I’d started the newsletter I finished a vicious East Tennessee novel inspired by James Dickey’s Deliverance, McCarthy’s Child of God and the ‘80s slasher movies I so love, and I was feeling very Southern, but “Puryear’s Southern Lit Jukebox” was kind of a goofy entry point into a literary ecosystem in which I now feel a lot more comfortable.

About ten years ago I dreamed up a literary journal called “Pedal Steel.” It risks sounding like a music publication, but that doesn’t matter. A pedal steel guitar is the most distinctive sound in American Country & Western music and Cosmic American music—and therefore it’s the most distinctly American sound—and my chief interests as a fiction writer are the lives and landscapes of the American interior. I’ve never been able to think of a title that better suits my vision for a literary venue. I’ve been thinking about it again lately, and I’ve also been thinking about renaming my newsletter, and then it just hit me that I might as well call this newsletter “Pedal Steel.”1

This gives it a lot more room to breathe. Since I’m a new dad with a full-time job and a pretty consistent creative output, I don’t think I could ever have the bandwidth to run a traditional literary journal, but this new direction opens that door—it’s not unlikely Pedal Steel (see, I’m using italics now) will host imaginative work and the participation of co-editors farther down the line.

A little about me: I was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was uninterested in books until college, discovering authors like Larry Brown, William Gay, Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, Joy Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson and Richard Ford. Tennessee isn’t some huge literary scene, and my advisor encouraged me to apply to MFAs. In 2013, at twenty-five years old, I got a fully funded spot at the University of Montana’s program, so I drove across the country solo. Each successive time I’ve driven all over the U.S. has been a transformative experience, and I’m passionate about domestic travel and spaces outside big cities, spaces in which, even in 2025, what Greil Marcus called the “Old Weird America” still exists. I’ve spent most of my life in the South and Interior West, and my favorite things to do are fly fishing, visiting small towns and visiting their dive bars—I bartended at one of them—and camping alongside rivers. I’m a guitar player and songwriter, occasionally gigging in bars and small venues around the northwest. Over the past decade-plus, I’ve written a collection’s-worth of short stories and two novels. Fiction writing and finding an audience and publishing is, second to my family, my life’s pursuit.

You can find links to some of my fiction at my website, brettpuryear.com.

For a long time I believed in the mystique of the writer, and that publishers were still interested in the gritty and darkly comic American realism popular between the years 1975 and 1995, stories that read well alongside films of the era like Badlands, Days of Heaven, Paris, Texas, Blue Velvet, Down by Law and Mystery Train. I partly still believe those things, but to some degree I don’t think you can make it as a writer today—and find an audience—without putting yourself out there online, and I do think there’s a place for this type of art, and of the aesthetic galaxy of a still-strange and largely rural and suburban country, but I don’t think it gets enough real estate. I’m not sure certain people even know it exists, or appreciate it as an Eden of artistic source material. A lot of people fucking hate it.

Publishing and literary discourse changed rapidly and dramatically after I finished my MFA in 2015 and started submitting stories and looking for agents. But there’s something exciting happening in the literary world. People who love to read and write are demanding something bigger and rawer and more inclusive. Writing about flyover America—in prose that’s stark or howling and gritty and highbrow-meets-low and wicked and funny—will have a place in this new literary carnivale. Work in the tradition of Airships, Rock Springs, Tom Franklin’s Poachers and Annie Proulx’s Close Range can move forward into our berserk modern era. Some folks are doing it. I’m extremely impressed by County Highway and their new venture Panamerica Books, and that whole vibe, and the open road ethos of Wildsam, but I’d like to see more of that out in the world. Here is Pedal Steel.

William Elbert Gay was born in the small town of Hohenwald, Tennessee, in 1941. He served in the Vietnam War. He painted houses and hung drywall. He was a carpenter. When he was a boy, he fell in love with Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and decided he wanted to be a writer. In the 1970s, he corresponded briefly with Cormac McCarthy, one of his heroes, and Cormac mailed him back some notes on whatever Gay’d been working on. William Gay didn’t publish a story in a literary journal until 1998. He was fifty-seven years old.

I met William Gay in 2009. I was a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and William was the visiting writer at the college’s writer’s conference. Undergrads submitted stories for a workshop held by this ragged scribe from Hohenwald, a town I’d never even heard of in which there is, I’ve heard, a very robust elephant sanctuary. When I went up to the conference hall in the UC, I saw Gay standing around under bright florescent bulbs in lightwashed jeans and dirty white sneakers and a blue blazer rumpled over a Bob Dylan tee shirt. He had a gray ‘stache and a curly mullet that looked like it’d been dipped in a pot of peanut oil. He looked about a hundred and thirty years old.

In workshop, he told the group about corresponding with Cormac in the ‘70s. He’d get notes back from Cormac saying things like, “You talk about the moon too much. Why so much moon? Less moon.”

William got to my story in the rotation and commented on how it felt more like a “mood piece” than a story. Basically his critique was that nothing really happened in it. I think I’d read a lot of stories like Hemingway’s iceberg-quintessent “Hills Like White Elephants,” but I’d also read stories like Gay’s “Bonedaddy, Quincy Nell, and the Fifteen Thousand BTU Electric Chair” — you can imagine that some shit might go down in a story that’s called that — and I didn’t yet know how to reconcile the two. At that point, I was simply wading the waters of language. Attempting to craft a narrative with movement and drama and danger hadn’t yet clicked for me, far from it.

But a buddy and I smoked cigarettes with William after the workshop, and I brought up how I was also a fan of Cormac McCarthy, had loved All the Pretty Horses. Gay said, “Yeah, I wasn’t as big on that one. I tend to like his old stuff a lot better. The darker Tennessee stuff he was doing in the seventies.”

I took away two big things from Gay that day: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee gothic novels of the ‘60s and ‘70s are his best work, and that, in a story, something should probably happen. I wound up driving him in my Jeep to the theater across the Tennessee River where he’d be reading from his novel Twilight, and that was the third big thing I got out of it. William Gay died three years later.

William Gay was a country maverick writer’s writer with no existing writerly credentials like an MFA or any glossy bylines before landing a story in The Georgia Review and getting an agent and publishing The Long Home, his debut novel, in the late nineties.

In that regard (a Tennessean, no MFA, no journalism on the side), Gay wasn’t unlike his hero McCarthy, but some readers make too much of the comparison. I’d say he’s receded somewhat from literary chatter because he’s seen as a sort of Cormac Lite (Gay didn’t do himself any favors by likewise omitting quotation marks from dialogue). Gay’s prose lies somewhere between McCarthy’s sparer (Child of God) and more maximalist (Suttree) registers, crafting his own imagistic gothic timbre, laced with a ruminative lilt wrought by his very genuine working class cred, and a childlike wonder in his descriptions of the natural world less harsh than McCarthy’s.

A mouthful way of saying: Gay found a voice uniquely his own. Makes sense he used McCarthy’s Tennessee era as a guidebook. Aside from early Cormac, there wasn’t much else from which a gothically-minded rural Tennessean could draw inspiration.

Gay’s fiction is devoutly Tennessean and devoutly, eerily bucolic. Naturally he picked up where McCarthy left off, and took hell’s own amount of time to develop a mastery of scene-setting and sentence-craft without neutering his decidedly ornate aesthetic.

Here’s the opening scene from William’s story “A Death In the Woods”:

Carlene was standing naked before the window when Pettijohn awoke. She was holding the curtains aside with an upraised arm and she was peering into the night, the flesh of her left breast lacquered by a pulsing light that cycled red to blue, red to blue, and back again.

What the hell is that? Pettijohn asked.

I don’t know, she said. Lights.

When she turned from the window, her eyes were just dark slots in the shadows of her face and lit so by the strobic light she might have been some erotic neon succubus he’d conjured from a fever dream.

Gay breaks a “rule” (opening with the protagonist, Pettijohn, waking up), and then wastes no time telling us something’s going down, without explicitly telling us: Carlene’s breast pulsing red to blue and red to blue. Police cruiser lights. He establishes their relationship — Pettijohn’s distrust of Carlene — via Pettijohn’s POV in close third, his perception of Carlene as a neon fever dream-succubus, with an odd and oddly passive syntax in that last paragraph, one that achieves an organic rhythm, and is stacked with detail and evocative diction — dark slots, strobing lights, neon, succubus, fever dream — yet transmits a singular, clear, almost cinematic image.

A scene in which a couple is in their bedroom, at night, could be the setup for some tedious domestic realism story whittled down by over-workshopping, but Gay’s setup here is hundred-proof-potent and lurid and ready for danger.

A hell of a novelist (his best might be Provinces of Night), Gay’s finest work is the story collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, a book that ought to be on every short story-lover’s shelf, warped and tattered by repeated use. The compactness of the short form allowed Gay to keep a steadier hand at the wheel, by which his aesthetic vision reads as more fully his own. The collection is a master class for anybody who values a balance between tired-but-sometimes-reliable MFA craft platitudes and an unflappable artistic vision; as in the collection’s title story, exquisitely structured narratives are heightened by poetic prose and hilarious calamity, violence, and death, as well as Gay’s love of the natural world — and of music.

The needle hissed on the record and there was Rodgers’ distinctive guitar lick then a dead voice out of a dead time still holding the same smoky sardonic lilt: She’s long, she’s tall, she’s six feet from the ground.

The old man was lost in the song and didn’t hear the girl until she was in the room. He turned and she was crossing the threshold. She had a plate in one hand and a tumbler of iced tea in the other. Jimmie Rodgers was singing: I hate to see that evenin sun go down, cause it makes me think I’m on my last go-round.

He arose and lifted the tonearm off the record.

Gay allows his stories to breathe, build an atmosphere. Gay was a tonal sorcerer. It is very important, Gay shows us, to suffuse story with, for lack of a better way of putting it, a fucking vibe.

At first light he was up as was his custom and in the dewy coolness he went up the slope behind the tenant house following the meandering line of an old rail fence he himself had built long ago. At the summit he paused to catch his breath and stood leaning on his walking stick peering back the way he’d come. The slope tended away in a stony tapestry and the valley lay spread out below him in a dreamy pastoral haze and mist rose out of the distant hollows blue as smoke. The sky was marvelously clear and on this July morning each sound seemed distinct and equidistant: he could hear cowbells on the other side of the woods, a truck laboring up a hill on some distant road. These sounds and sights reminded him of his childhood long ago in Alabama, and they caused a singing in his blood and a rise in his spirits, he could hear his heart hammering strong and fierce as when he was a boy. He was alive and the world alive with him and he had come back to it without either of them being changed.

I could maybe spend an hour-long class dissecting all the ways in which this paragraph is a lyric, tonal and visual marvel. It seems almost like something an editor would want to cut so as to keep things moving along but William Gay evidently got lucky with his editor, somebody who knows that fiction is not to be reduced to a form less accommodating to human feeling, interiority and our our experiences of place and the natural world than film. If Terrence Malick can do it on the screen, the skilled writer ought to try it out on the page.

Gay allows his characters to wander and think and observe, but he also knew, as he’d taught me, that shit still needs to happen, and he wisely situates such gorgeous passages before, after, and in the midst of pulsing scenes of great conflict, suspense, and fire. And Gay tends to set us up with a pretty severe conflict from page one. In this story, well, there’s no need for explaining it. Here’s the opening line: “When the taxicab let old man Meecham out in the dusty roadbed by his mailbox the first thing he noticed was that someone was living in his house.” The reader knows there’s trouble afoot right from the get-go and by the time we get to that whimsical passage above we already know there’s going to be enough of a payoff that we don’t mind walking around the pastureland with Meecham for a little while, we might even pause with the old man while he spins one of his Jimmie Rodgers records.

And we do. We know there’s danger just around the corner. Might as well take a breath and soak up some scenery before shit hits the fan. Gay delivered the best of both worlds — poetics and narrative horsepower — in ways most writers just absolutely cannot do.

In one of the collection’s masterpieces, “The Paperhanger,” our narrator opens with this: “The vanishing of the doctor’s wife’s child in broad daylight was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now, the before and the after.”

I’m not necessarily keen on the maxim that a story ought to start with a conflict right away, the “dead body on the first page” philosophy. This notion seemed to take hold in the late aughts and 2010s (based solely off my own observations submitting stories to high-end literary journals at the time and getting a sense of what editors were looking for): we need conflict right away, or, the oft-repeated we need to know what our character wants. Many, many great stories have been rejected from literary journals because the first few lines weren’t hooky enough. The bottomless riches of longform prose ought to render fiction an incredibly malleable art form and therefore “hook the reader” dogma is more than a little absurd, however, it does serve its practical purposes — and obviously helps grow an audience. But I don’t think William Gay followed any “rules” beyond his own wild talent and instincts toward good old fashioned storytelling.

With Gay we get everything. Drama, suspense, readability and extraordinary lyricism. It’s why his main man Cormac was so successful. Crime writer James Lee Burke also works in this register. It’s poetry you can grab a bag of popcorn for.

Aspiring prose stylists who’d also like to learn how to write a gripping story should order a copy of I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down right away, but so should everyone else. This book is part of the pantheon of essential Southern Gothic story collections, with books like Airships and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

The bulk of Gay’s work was published in the twenty-first century, a time in which I think there’s been a little bit of a drought of Southern Gothic fiction in which there’s real magic to the writing, not just grit lit and fast-paced-crime-plus-psychopreacher (which I have no problem with).

As folks incessantly decry a lack of strong literary fiction in our era, the term literary fiction has become increasingly vague — and that’s because it is. The dense thinky novel of olde, of social pontificate-iness and philosophical digressions might be an endangered species simply because we have too much information at our fingertips now anyway. But for my money a work of “literary fiction” is any narrative in any genre that exercises extreme care at the sentence-level, to the extent that big emotions can emerge in the reader by a single turn of phrase. And it never hurts to give readers a good story. A story about human beings in trouble by which to anchor this language. Gay gives us a pretty reliable guidebook on what good literary fiction looks like in the twenty-first century. All hail the lyrical page-turner.

I never dreaded sundown. I was just a boy and dusk fell and I’d go out with my big brother, catching lightning bugs. There’s something eerie about the mid-South. East Tennessee. Jack-o-lanterns smell differently there on Halloween, and I can’t describe the smell. As a writer, I should at least try. But it’s just something I remember, a small thing, and, anyway, jack-o-lanterns kind of smell the same no matter where you’re from.

Winter, spring, summer, fall. It didn’t matter what time of year it was. My mom would take me to the library all the time, and I’d head straight for the Halloween section, all the slim children’s books whose spines had orange stickers with a witch silhouetted in black. Stories of little grinning goblins, grim grinning ghosts, talking pumpkins, friendly scarecrows, aspiring young witches, dark trees filled with talking crows and bats; a little old lady who lives all alone, out in her yard digging for a soup bone, and making friends with a dancing skeleton.

The older kids at church told ghost stories. Local legends they’d probably made up themselves, on the spot, and I’d bug them to tell me more. (This inspired a piece of short fiction of mine you can read here). We went to Blake’s (one of the oldest church boys, one of the oldest acolytes) house one night while our parents were partying or whatever downstairs and Blake popped Friday the 13th into the VHS player and I sat down and watched (I think I was about eight) this movie with my older brother and Blake and their friends and, near the end of the film, when Pamela Voorhees hisses “Kill her, mommy, kill her,” I ran out of the room crying.

That was the start of my strange obsession with the aesthetics of horror, the gothic, the macabre. I’m a pretty normie guy, even for a writer. Boots and flannels and fly shop ballcaps. I don’t even really dress up on Halloween. But in the month of October, I aim to watch a horror flick every night of the month (my gal is finally getting used to this). In college, I started reading and writing literary fiction, and it never occurred to me that I could actually read horror.

This must have something to do with how genre writing was treated by literary types and in writing programs in the late aughts and 2010s. In the past few years, I’ve given horror a fairer shot. If I’m going through a stretch reading Carver and Hemingway, I mix it up with a little Thomas Ligotti or Paul Tremblay or this anthology of folk horror I’d highly recommend. Or some crime. Some noir. Last book I finished was The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson, and the best book I’ve read this year was The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke. Wow! What a novel! Looking back at the literary fiction that first attracted me to writing, I have a clearer sense of why these particular authors spoke to this here horror buff. The four horsemen of my literary coming-of-age were Denis Johnson, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner. Maybe I wasn’t keeping these two parts of myself as separate as I’d thought:

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son is kind of scary. Those of you who love this collection can likely recall the story “Dirty Wedding,” in which an addict cynically accompanies his girlfriend to get an abortion, is greeted there by religious freaks who “shook droplets of holy water … and twisted their rosaries around their fingers … A man in dark glasses shadowed Michelle right up the big steps to the door, chanting softly in her ear.” Fuckhead is banished from the clinic, follows a mysterious man whose “chest was like Christ’s” on the train and winds up in a seedy bar (“Everything down there but the curtain was red.”)

Night by afternoon. Darkly, darkly the happy hour.

I won’t waste time getting into the ending. Amidst the lyric prose and the comedy and all of the things that make this collection a classic, there is horror here, there are textures of horror. Its opening story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” flies up from the inferno with clouds that look like “great grey brains” and a few dead bodies. “A liquid which I knew right away was human blood flew around the car and rained down on my head.” Jesus’ Son has a pretty decent body count for a literary work. In Johnson’s debut novel Angles, and even his poetry collection The Incognito Lounge, some of the strongest moments are darkly textured by the macabre, intensely lurid imagery, and psychological terror.

You get the idea, and I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know: Flannery O’Connor’s serial killer-road story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”; Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark, Child of God, Blood Meridian and The Road, all “literary fiction” in name only; Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, one of my favorite works of book-length prose, contains a chapter narrated by a corpse. With the exception of Johnson, these are landmarks of Southern Gothic fiction, a subgenre I’d argue is the most horror-adjacent of any “literary” category. My coming of age as a writer was shaped by prejudices against genre fiction in the greater galaxy of snobbish literary types, the kind of people who go to AWP every year and claim they enjoyed some tepid, impossible-to-enjoy new release that got reviewed in the Times because it was “illuminating” or “urgent.”

Southern Gothic was, and still is, the genre I seek the most, what speaks to me. But I could always get away with reading that stuff without thinking I’d stooped to reading genre. Now, as a thirty seven year-old with a couple degrees and some publications and an agent, I’m somehow less snobbish than I once was, and maybe that’s because I’ve simply kept on living. I can’t imagine being biased against genre, and, thankfully, genre’s made its way into what’s considered literary fiction. My first step away from these prejudices happened after I’d got through with my MFA and read several books by Raymond Chandler. As I drew away from a more strict diet of literary fiction and embraced crime/noir, horror, thrillers and weird fiction — a reading diet that reflects my tastes more broadly (movies, music, etc) — I’ve become a much better reader, a much better writer.

In my piece on MFAs, sentence-craft and the literary counter-culture, the greater crux of the argument focused on just that:

Low- and middle-brow art, TV, cinema, music and crime fiction also ought to be employed. High snobbery and internet forum anguish, and a throwback allegiance to the classics, might have the opposite of their intended effect.

…

The modern reappraisal of genre fiction and its integration into capital L literature has had exciting effects on the contemporary literary landscape, because writers are using television and film — Game of Thrones and Severance and A24 horror — as inspiration, too, in our genre-fied streaming era. How is any of this related? Writers who embrace contemporary culture rather than espouse a vicious hatred over it might find the best footing over the coming years.

I think we ought to be asking ourselves, during a time in which there’s lots of discourse over a flattening-out of literary fiction in the traditional marketplace, whether or not we should be hearkening back to the classics (Romanticism, Modernism, etc.) or if we should embrace the media landscape into (and out of) which we’ve come of age (for the record, I think embracing both is good). ‘80s VHS horror movie covers encountered in a Blockbuster when I was a kid now hold almost as much sway over my aesthetic aim as Dubliners did for me fifteen years ago. Am I getting dumber with age? I’m not saying this is “the right way,” and I really don’t know how to push this idea further without input from other writers in the, let’s say, 25-50 year-old demographic (pretty rangy demographic!).

That’s the conversation I’m increasingly interested in seeing in literary circles. Here’s a response to my MFA piece that aptly interpreted what I was getting at:

Anyway, thanks, , whoever you are, you nailed it.

Anyway-anyway, I can say this: I let go of all literariness and snobbish pretenses (in my own writing process, at least) last fall when I’d sat down and started writing a backwoods Appalachian literary grindhouse slasher novel (it’s bonkers) and had the most fun I’ve ever had writing. Ever. It’s my best work, bar none. I’ve written many literary short stories and an unpublished literary realist novel, but this is the thing that’s me.

The guy who wrote that Compact piece that went viral, who said literary men are too cowardly to write fiction about their life and times and default to genre out of safety? Well, whoop-tee-fucking-doo, cock-a-doodle-doo. In my view, writers who embrace genre are simply smart artists who aren’t afraid to capture their own, well, life and times (which has less to do with being a distressed internet pedestrian in a millennial psychic hellscape than many a internet-pontificator might think; contrary to popular belief, being a human today still involves IRL relationships and classic sorrows and ecstasies and desires and danger and even a kinship with the natural world).

I got side-tracked. Anyway! I allowed the Halloween-head into my little sacred art bubble and now, almost twenty years into my writing life, I can’t even recognize the twenty five year-old me in MFA workshops trying to imitate Hemingway in a Techniques of Modern Fiction course. Over the years, I’ve sat down and tried to write a serious, thinky novel (this was stupid, because I am only Medium Smart), but I struggled to come up with a good story.

That’s because, for years, I kept asking myself, What do I care about? Instead of asking myself, What do I like? Or, better yet, asking myself nothing at all.

Yeah! What do you like!? If you write about what you like, craft will follow. The techniques and skills you’ve picked up throughout the years will follow, and will further animate your fiction. Complexity and thematic nuance will follow. This isn’t to discourage anyone from writing The Big Introspective Literary Novel, I’m just saying: write whatever the fuck you want. You love BBQ baby back ribs with a burning passion? Fuck it, write the Great American Novel of Ribs.

My short stories are a different story; I can contain my more realist-adjacent ideas in that form. And I’m sure I’ll wind up writing another straight-up literary novel. But for my new, book-length manuscript, I had to let the Devil in. I had to say Hello to that kid who made Mom check out all those books with the witch-sticker spines, to the dude who rewatches Mulholland Drive a lot just to see the scary guy pop up from around the corner behind Winkies (and Club Silencio and the whispering blue-haired woman), and who thinks the first Friday the 13th is lean and mean and gritty and unfairly maligned, and the guy who prefers Child of God over All the Pretty Horses, who gets as much literary inspiration from Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy and Sunn O))) as he gets from The Sound and The Fury. Combining these influences have become key to finding my voice, to becoming a writer in the 21st century, to feeling truly actualized in my work.

But that’s just me, and for anyone who’s reading, drop a comment below and tell me if there’s a work of literary fiction you can think of that’s truly scary or dark or Lynchian or something like that, that even has some of those elements. I love that intersection more than anything on the planet, and would die to get some recs. That’s the fun thing about opening yourself up to genre and things like it: now there’s so much more out there to pick from. The world of creative artifacts is so much less drab when you dance with the Devil. Or the aliens. Or whatever.

Memphis is an evil place. Throughout my childhood, it was overrun with crime and mayhem. People walked around like zombies high on drugs. I felt like Memphis actually was hell.

- Juicy J, Chronicles of the Juice Man: A Memoir

JORDAN HOUSTON THE THIRD might’ve been in some bedroom he shared with his brother Patrick — “Project Pat” — reading Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records, a book he’d read about a hundred times, when his grandmother shouted for the boys to “Get down.” Gunshots cracking outside the apartment.

These were regular occurrences in Houston’s neighborhood in northern Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1980s. It was a slums cordoned off from the city’s white neighborhoods, a sweltering mid-South war zone, its incredible violence ignored by the Memphis police. If the cops showed any interest in its people, it was only to catch them on the right side of the tracks and beat their asses.

Houston’s father was a preacher hollering the good word, his mother a substitute teacher and librarian. No cursing in the apartment. But in the area, needles were strewn all over the streets, and the cult leader Lindberg Sanders (who’d called himself “Black Jesus”) had awaited The Moon Event and its resulting massacre — vestiges of the Voodoo Village, which Houston’s mother beheld as a child, a neighborhood in which homes were adorned with crosses and stars and dolls.

In Houston’s mid-eighties North Memphis, hustlers roamed the cracked sidewalks wielding rusty pistols, pushing rocks to ravenous hordes of the harried undead.

Jordan dreamed of musical stardom. He wanted to be great. He listened to the Stax legends, he listened to hip-hop. Run-DMC and Whodini. He listened to Michael Jackson and George Michael and Elton John and Pat Benatar and Prince. He cobbled together a four track recorder from shit he’d found on the street. His parents were skeptical. Horror all around him, he sought solace in the slashers and monster movies of the time. American Werewolf In London was a particular favorite.

In the southside of Memphis, a more affluent community, Paul Beauregard had painted Chucky from Child’s Play on the back of his car. When Houston first met him, Paul was walking around with a Chucky doll.

Both aspiring DJs in the early 1990s, Paul and Jordan would later form the Backyard Posse with Paul’s nephew Ricky Dunigan, known later as Lord Infamous, or, “The Scarecrow,” a fellow acolyte of the macabre.

Together they’d forge an expression of Memphian horror more sinister than the realist gangsta rap pouring out of LA and NYC. A new mode of rendering the dangers of oppressed and impoverished and criminalized communities, embracing and subverting the Satanic Panic of the era.

When Gangsta Boo, Crunchy Black and Koopsta Knicca joined the crew, Triple Six Mafia was born. Then they renamed themselves: Three 6 Mafia. Local radio refused to play their songs, and Three 6 came off a little less 666 than Triple Six. Jordan Houston — now “Juicy J” — figured Three 6 just sounded more like some random-ass numbers and maybe they’d fool the disc jockeys. It worked.

In 1995, Three 6 released their full-length debut, Mystic Stylez, an eerily lo-fi blend of gangsta rap, early iterations of crunk and trap music, and a sonic landscape inspired by horror film scores, its menace and mystery heightened by grimy production, homespun beats, and a taste for the grotesque. Underground shit, informed by an ‘80s upbringing, amid a culture allowing grindhouse aesthetics into the mainstream — slasher flicks and Mad Max and Conan the Barbarian and Re-Animator and Killer Klowns from Outer Space — a moviehouse, VHS-and-late-night-TV bloodbath flooding American living rooms, smoked-out basement dens. Jason. Freddy. Michael Meyers. Kiefer Sutherland in fangs, eyeliner and a platinum mullet. The vampiric punktry bumpkins of Katheryn Bigelow’s Near Dark. Houston and Beauregard and the rest of the Triple Six crew escaped the horror of reality and into the caped, cathartic maw of eighties schlock and terror, into the shadowed, crimson-cartooned recesses of slasherland.

I, and many others like us, have sought solace from hopelessness in the works of John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Wes Craven and Tobe Hopper. Now, folks like Jordan Peele, Coralie Fargeat, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Ty West and Panos Cosmatos have helped shepherd a new horror renaissance for the disaffected amid a morphed era of algorithmic dehumanization, intellectual dilution, a now-more-visibly depreciated middle class and the cultural stranglehold of a confusingly bizarre partisan politics. Triple Six felt the power of the macabre in their early work, and knew that a hunger for devilment, even as a surface-level gimmick, could help a body transcend the terror. They forged a youthful, underground style of rap that captured the darkness. Mystic Stylez is its purest expression.

In “Break Da Law ‘95,” ominous, distorted synths and shrieking phantom sirens and John Carpenter, Halloween-style piano loops swarm about a posse chanting break the law break the law break the law break the law as though in a trance of criminal-mindedness and murder, DJ Paul beckoning his listeners, his victims, “Come with me to Hell.”

Bell-toned, evil dollhouse synths trill in the background while Jordan “Juicy J” Houston, on the album’s title track, raps: “Deep when we creep, take your last breath. Roll up a tombstone, smoke a blunt of death.”

In “Now I’m Hi, Pt 3,” a deep, heartbeat bass pumps while a breathy choir — Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, “2/1”, but in a DOOM level — glissades evilly in back of dreamscape chimes and another chant-style intro. These chants are a precursor to the 2000s Crunk Boom, as were the Mafia’s nihilistic and almost appalling appeals to getting really, really fucked up all the time.

The four horsemen of the Mafia’s subject matter: Satanism/the macabre, violent criminal acts, fucking, and getting fucked up. These would remain tenets throughout their career, even as the devil thing diminished with each new LP.

By the time Most Known Unknown came out in ‘06, their first significant commercial success, Three 6 Mafia had devolved fully into party rap. Most Known wasn’t a bad crunk record (and they’d had every right, they more or less invented the genre), but what they’d been doing in the ‘90s and early aughts was a unique, hip-hop expression of the Southern Gothic tradition, with its emphasis on the region’s darkness and decay and monsterdom.

Three 6 had, essentially, inverted the hugely mainstream gangsta rap of the early 1990s into a horror movie vision of the poverty, gang violence and drug-induced squalor they’d grown up around. While LA and NYC titans like Dre and Tupac documented their milieu with an approachable realism and clarity and silky, funk- and soul-inspired beats, Triple Six conjured real monsters, and played their roles accordingly, Lord Infamous, “The Scarecrow,” caroling, “Mystic Stylez of the ancient mutilations, torture chambers filled with corpses in my basement. Feel the wrath of the fucking devilition. Three six mafia, creation of Satan.”

I was eleven or twelve, in the fifth or sixth grade — it was 1999 or 2000 — sitting next to my buddy on a charter bus heading for a school field trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, when he opened his giant CD case.

Gatlinburg is a gaudy tourist town at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains. Our class had gone on a two night trip, the purpose of which escapes me. I remember us hitting up the arcades, laser tag emporiums, and a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not haunted house off the main drag (It was terrifying, I still think about it). We went to Dollywood, a Dolly Parton-themed amusement park (if you don’t already know).

I’m sure we’d visited Cade’s Cove, a historic preserve of Appalachian Frontier cabins and chapels. I’m sure the whole thing had some kind of educational lean. This was a liberal arts magnet school, though, and we had us some fun. We all stayed in a hotel and I got to share a room with a bunch of my pals and we’d talk about girls and listen to music. We roamed the hotel with lax supervision. I had a girlfriend, and I bought her a sea turtle necklace at some gift shop, but I was too nervous to sit next to her at dinner that night at the Golden Corral buffet — it was all girls at her table, all boys at mine. Her friends called out to me, laughing, because the sea turtle was missing a leg. I didn’t know it was like that when I bought it. I was extremely embarrassed, and quiet. I don’t think I talked to her the rest of the trip, and she broke up with me, via handwritten note, at school one day shortly after we’d arrived back home, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

But on the bus, my friend — he was the kid whose parents smoked cigarettes in the house and had a high school brother mired in dope-smoking accusations — slid a CD out of the plastic slip. This was back when you’d pull the cover booklet out of the jewel case and tuck it behind the disc in your Big CD Briefcase. The cover depicted black men in ski masks lurking in the foreground of a psychedelic haze crazed with skulls, the album titled Chapter 2: World Domination, by Three 6 Mafia. My buddy Porter passed me his Discman, and I put on the headphones and listened to “Hit a Muthafucka.”

Chapter 2: World Domination went Gold, selling over 500,000 copies, but it was hardly some mainstream colossus, and I like to believe my Tennessee upbringing brought us a little closer to the Triple Six action. All I knew then was that it probably wasn’t something I was supposed to be listening to.

But it was thrilling. As a young boy, I was an acolyte of the macabre. I loved scary movies, even when they scared me too much to actually finish them. Years later, as a teenage burnout who could recite rhymes from The End and Chapter 2 and When the Smoke Clears and Da Unbreakables from memory, Mystic Stylez scared the shit out of me — its hood-horror-grime cover art and lo-fi beats and devil lyrics.

It’d take me a long time to listen to it front-to-back, a trepidation tantamount to the thrill of ghastliness that still beckons me towards horror. Being afraid, and enduring the macabre, makes me feel alive and human. Makes me feel brave enough to protect and care for my loved ones, to go to work, to write fiction, to kiss my girl goodnight and know the boogeyman’s not coming. The lurid artistry of grim darkness and Halloween masks and human blood thickens my skin, turns it into chrome.

Jordan Houston, who grew up in North Memphis in the 1980s and ‘90s, likewise engaged with the transcendental power of horror.

In high school, I lived in a town just outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, kind of on the edge of the country. Off-road trails and lakes and woods nearby, I rolled around in my buddy CF’s black Pontiac Firebird with subs bumping in the back, smoking dank and snorting coke before first period. It’s an Appalachian foothills community of subdivisions, trailer courts, fast food restaurants and a giant high school that looks like a penitentiary. The town’s grown quite a bit since then, an explosion of McMansions. I wonder how that’s going.

My parents’ relationship wasn’t doing so hot — money was getting bad — and I went to this ugly public high school filled with rich kids, middle-class kids, kids who lived in trailers, blacks, whites, hispanics, potheads and geeks and punks and drug dealers. I rode around with my other buddy Mike in his maroon Honda coupe with blacked-out windows selling dank, mids and schwag (whatever kind of weed was around to sell) and popping Xanax bars and selling those too. Or I’d hang with my best bud CF in the black Pontiac blaring Three 6 and Kid Rock and not selling anything, just using. It was that fucking weird post-9/11, pre-Obama era in which American Grime had seeped into suburban red state culture. Something rotten between the past and the present that you can’t put a name to. Ripped Abercrombie & Fitch jeans and subwoofers and vandalism and the school’s best-looking girls rolling into homeroom hungover as hell. I don’t know how to describe it. Is that my job here? Guess you had to’ve been there.

I was very depressed back then, and I can see that now. My on-again-off-again sweetheart at the time might still be in prison, last time I checked. My buddy Mike with the blacked-out Civic is dead of a heroin overdose, and a number of other kids I hung out and did drugs with are dead.

Mike stayed over at my house sometimes and Mom joked about his slicked-back black hair, called it a pompadour. I’d never heard the word pompadour before, and I still think it’s a funny word.

It was a lot of riding around and getting fucked up and getting into casual scrapes with the damned. Parking and partying. Buying drugs. Lusting. There were a lot of fights. In back of the local grocery store, a bunch of 15-18 year-olds would crowd up to watch a couple enraged white kids beat each other because of some ludicrous beef, usually involving a girl. My buddy Mike, the one with the Honda who’s dead, had a drug beef with this lanky, pimpled dude with a Beatles bowl-cut, and I rode with Mike to their big fight, back in an empty cul-de-sac. Mike was fucked up on Xanax and weed (and driving), and Mike burst out the car hollering shit like, “You bitch-ass pussy-ass motherfucker, come get some, bitch, you wanna fuck with me?” but Mike got his ass kicked because he was too zonked on pills to throw a good punch.

One time, I almost got in a fight myself, against my friend Matt R., because Matt R. had a large, curved nose and I drew a picture of him as a bird (it was actually a pretty decent picture) and put it in his mailbox, which really pissed off his parents, and I’d started calling him “The Bird,” and then he’d had enough. The Bird and I met up in front of a frankly disappointing crowd — a predictable turnout for me, whose personality oscillated sharply between extreme shyness and explosive bouts of jokesterdom — and we both wound up chickening out.

As our suburb started expanding into the country, there were many subdivisions in development, so there’d be a lot of fights in cul-de-sacs encircled by frame houses, empty and skeletal, and this was also a great place to hang out and take drugs. A lot of this occurred during hours in which we should’ve been at school. But the most memorable shenanigans happened at night.

Problem is, a lot of it’s hard to remember. It’s all hard to remember. Parties in spec homes throbbing, Yin Yang Twins and Lil’ John and T.I. and white kids ripping rails of blow cut with too much Arm & Hammer, wanna-be Fred Dursts donning fake diamond earrings courting dolled-up chicks in low-rise jeans, and my ass leaping out a window when the cops busted in, scurrying away into the woods, crouching alone in the dark.

Nightly gatherings in the Hobby Lobby parking lot where we’d buy pills — Klonopins, Percocets, Oxys, and lots of Xanax — and kids showing off their fake rims and spinners and subwoofers roaring and Westbrook popping his hatch, a trunk stacked with rolls of Skoal and Copenhagen and packs of Camel and Parliament cigs, like a portable convenience store for minors, because we all used tobacco, needed nicotine. Our favorite smokes were Parliaments, ‘cause we could key bumps of coke from their recessed filters. Under the media gauze of a unified post-9/11 patriotism, I think all us kids had been morphed into unwilling nihilists.

But me and CF, we’d ride on into my driveway after midnight and sit in the car and chief on a blunt and play Three 6 Mafia, very loud. I’d sink in the bucketseat and drift. I’d download MP3s of their shit and screw and chop Triple Six songs through Windows Media Player so I could hear Project Pat’s “Out There” slowed down to a low pitch that matched my high, while CF and I sat silent in … whichever car he was driving.

He had the Firebird, then throughout high school he purchased a lifted Jeep Grand Cherokee, A ‘77 Smoky and the Bandit Trans-am with the firebird hood decal, a Ford Expedition, a Chevy Chevelle, a 2001 white Pontiac Trans-am with the fluted Ram-Air hood, and I think an Escalade by the time I was nineteen or so but I can’t remember because at that time in my life I’d developed a serious diet of cocaine, Oxys, Xanax, wake’n’bake weed and tons of alcohol, whatever my ass could get my hands on. CF’s parents weren’t rich. My Tennessee buddies and I still don’t know how he bought all those cars. CF talked a lot about murder.

Anyway, in high school we listened to Three 6 Mafia while we rode around getting high and pretending to be excited about being alive.

Us suburban white kids, we didn’t know a goddamned thing about the kind of shit Jordan Houston grew up around, yet Jordan’s heavy, surreal beats and deep bass and lyrics — documenting a kind of cheerful, unbridled drug abuse and comically over-the-top violence — lent a veiled sheen of romantic thuggery upon our unrealized malaise and incredible rage. I’d sit in the car in the dark and CF got quiet, smoking a bowl of purplish dank, bathed in the blue-green light of the dash and Pioneer stereo, Three 6 conjuring images of purple neon smoke and sunglasses at night, escapism into nocturnal danger. Blue Velvet before I’d watched Blue Velvet. It was music, then, as it often is, that kept many of us from going truly berserk.

The white music we’d gotten into at the time — late ‘90s and early aughts hard rock and nu-metal — was an affair wrought purely by anger, charmless down-tuned riffs and gruff male wailing bereft of whimsy and actual swagger. Three 6 Mafia summoned complex sonic textures, exuberance and humor. This might be the real turning point by which hip-hop artistry superseded rock’n’roll. Hip-hop was closer to the spirit of Elvis Presley than anything by Creed or Godsmack or Chevelle or Papa Roach, and early aughts NYC sleaze-rock and Williamsburg indie was far, far away from impacting flyover country. There were some smart kids at school rocking to the Strokes, sure, but most of us just hadn’t gotten there yet. Three 6 Mafia’s mid-career gothic crunk, still darkly textured yet sleeker and popping with a little more color, was the perfect antidote for disaffected young crackers suffering through Nickelback country.

Triple Six rapped about Tennessee. Memphis was a six-hour drive away from Chattanooga, and I doubt many of us kids had even been there, but it felt good hollering, “North Memphis! North Memphis!” out the open sunroof in cheap sunglasses cracking open a Natty Light, getting ready for danger. Plastic bags of fireworks in the backseat — Black Cats and roman candles and cherry bombs — wondering which random mailbox we’d try and explode next. Hungry to commit crimes.

As recounted in his memoir, Chronicles of the Juice Man, Jordan Houston, after achieving mainstream success in the mid-2000s and winning an unlikely Oscar — for a song called “It’s Hard Out Here for A Pimp,” penned for the film Hustle & Flow — left LA and tried to clean up his act. Moved back to Memphis. The mainstream wasn’t for him, and he’d developed a pill problem ‘cause of quack MDs, so he moved home and got himself married, had a couple of kids, and released a solid record called Stay Trippy, and a hit song, “Bandz A Make Her Dance,” which is, it must be acknowledged, a song about flicking rubber bands at strippers.

Half of Three 6 Mafia’s original lineup would soon die. In 2013, the year Stay Trippy came out, Ricky Dunigan AKA Lord Infamous AKA The Scarecrow died of a drug-induced heart attack in his sleep, at his mother’s home in Memphis, at forty years-old. Koopsta Knicca, who’d gotten kicked out of the group circa ‘98, died of a stroke in ‘15, also at forty. Koopsta, according to the Juice Man, was a violent criminal menace, for whom The Juice holds no love, even after his death. I can only imagine that Koop, one of Triple Six’s most demonic lyricists, lived out the Triple Six ethos just a little too hard. Lola Mitchell AKA Gangsta Boo AKA The Devil’s Daughter, who rapped “I blaze the blunt up in the air just to relax and get high, the moon is full and all I see is 666 in the sky,” left the group after the success of When the Smoke Clears, citing a need to reconnect with her Christian roots, saying, “I’m not cursing in my music no more.” In 2023, at forty-three years old, Lola died of an accidental overdose. Her body possessed traces of alcohol, cocaine and fentanyl.

I OFTEN WONDER HOW MANY OF MY OLD FRIENDS ARE DEAD, that I just haven’t heard about. I’ve just turned thirty-seven. I’ve lived in different places, mostly Montana, since I was twenty-five. I visited home last fall with my girl (who always gets sea turtles with four legs) and my buddy Blake told me about another. OD’d.

“———’s dead? No fucking shit? Really? God, that’s awful.” What else can you say?

One time, Honda Mike called me up just after he’d gotten out of prison. This was maybe a decade ago. I’d already moved to Montana and got my fiction MFA and fancied myself some sprouting literary stud and I’d promised to get in touch with him again soon, but I never did. I don’t remember telling him I’d decided to be a writer. I’d just told him I’d moved to Montana. “Montana!” he shouted. This was a pretty common response. “Montana! Hell you doing in Montana?!” He sounded pretty good. He’d picked up a thicker accent in prison, and he told me, real slow and almost sensually, that he was done with heroin. That I was one of the first people he’d called when he got out, even though we hadn’t talked in years.

I’d heard thereafter that Mike had thrown himself heavily into dance, and would dress up in silky suits, and I even saw a picture of him on Facebook, when I’d still had Facebook, and he was sharply dressed and very bulky, very much a gym man, with his shirt half-unbuttoned and his chest all slick and sculpted, smiling with the other Dancers With the Stars, because Mike had participated in Chattanooga’s local iteration of television’s popular Dancing With the Stars program, just a local contest, and he had won. He was smiling and grouped up with some other very fit dudes, white, Hispanic, and black, some wearing eyeliner, all very happy. That’s the last thing I knew about Mike.

Buy Brett a Beer

Acolytes

“The guy who’d owned this house was a dentist,” Blake said, “and he went nuts and gave his cows root canals.”

We’d left our fire burning and walked beneath the walnut trees lining the tennis court.

“I heard there was a town up Monteagle Mountain,” Danny Price said. “But everyone left. Some of them died. There’s a kind of post office, still. Lot of theories about what happened and none of them good.”

Danny Price—he was the oldest acolyte, and just loaded with knowledge.

“In McDonald,” McCall said, “a rich college boy and a cheerleader from Notre Dame High School lay together on the train tracks, middle of the night, hugging, and got run over. Lot of people thought it was an act of love.”

This is so much fun, I thought.

Last Labor Day there’d been a hayride. Last Labor Day I’d seen McCall get hot and peel herself down to a sports bra, and then I got hot too. Last Labor Day I’d stuffed myself full of hot dogs with chili, and Danny Price told Blake and me ghost stories beneath the gnarled oak tree. But the ghost stories then were not true.

Back in the spring, Allen and Susanne Whaley’s six-year-old granddaughter had engaged herself with a loaded Beretta and the thing went off. The adults this Labor Day drank more now, seemed to stay separate from their children.

This Labor Day, we cooked our own hot dogs, even built our own fire.

Tonight you could feel autumn gaining early. Step outside and feel like you’d emerged from a good bath and dried yourself off, threw on a set of new clothes. Dark poured in from the eastern mountains, and a burst of crows flung out of the pine forest, shot skyward, curled and nosedived and vanished into the forest again. The last sunlight threw itself over the tennis court. I was paying attention tonight. My senses were loaded in me like a bag of needles.

This rental house—the dentist’s old house—was a sprawling, one-story ranch-style sitting on thirty-some acres. The adults stayed fixed to the veranda, dancing. The veranda was a horrendous brown thing canopied by a ‘70s-style vinyl ceiling.

On the veranda, my father was falling all over Marie Lupton, the church receptionist. She’d put on The Big Chill soundtrack. My mother, she plucked deviled eggs off Jack Hatcher’s plate and sung along with “I Second That Emotion.” They’d all made a punch with a healthy ratio of Jack Daniel’s, and plenty more straight stuff shone in bottles on the picnic table.

“That was in the ‘70s, after the dentist and his wife built the house,” Blake said. “That’s why they rent it out. Hasn’t been bought in thirty years. He killed the wife, gave her root canals till she bled out in the bathtub. The big fancy one in the master bedroom. They say the bath’s haunted. They say you turn on this faucet looking like a swan head and old blood comes out.”

I was barefoot, and the hard, fat, green walnuts were scattered all around the tennis court like tiny tennis balls, pretty harsh underfoot. I winced, I cursed inside my head, but I didn’t say anything. When I’d step on an actual tennis ball, it was much softer, and like a gift being given.

“He’s making it all up,” McCall told me.

“But I love the story, the idea of it,” Danny Price said.

Danny wore a faux mechanic’s shirt with the name Elvis on the breastpatch. Danny Price, I thought, was the coolest human being who’d ever climbed out of a mother. And McCall was the most first-class girl in my life. She would never see the nickel-sized mole, right side of my ass. She’d never know about the bad toenail. When McCall was nine, her dad took her out shooting with an old muzzleloader and bent to get a beer out of his cooler, and the muzzleloader discharged, spraying black powder in her eyes.

I leaned into McCall and said, “I heard the Whaleys are getting a divorce on account of their kid getting shot.”

“Don’t talk about that,” she said.

“So how could lying together and getting killed on some train tracks be an act of love?” Blake said.

“Nobody ever found out why they did it,” Danny said. “Probably drugs.”

“Pot?” I said.

“Please don’t talk about that. Are you listening?” McCall said.

And Danny said, “It was his gun. He’d left it out with the safety off. He’d been turkey hunting at their cabin in Liberty. I mean, it was definitely an accident. But my mom says marriages are tough. Not her and my dad, but some marriages. Christine didn’t even like having it in the house. Mom says you really can’t blame her, and my dad’s sympathetic to him. But the guys, they’re all going to be sympathetic. I guess I am too.”

McCall picked up a large walnut, or was it a tennis ball? Anyway, she was crying, and she hurled the thing at Danny. You could hear the big smack it made against his chest, but he didn’t move or say anything.

She screamed—something like mean shitting bastard—and ran all the way to the house.

Blake said, “She’s not allowed to say that word.”

But Danny Price, already in the eighth grade, was the oldest acolyte, and burdened by knowledge. He hadn’t made a face when the tennis ball, or walnut, had walloped him. You could see then that people got burdened in a big way early, just loaded already with some pretty sorry news.

And Blake said, “How can she just run all the way to the house? And knowing just where it’s at?”

“They’re all like that,” Danny Price said. “They’ve got an extra sense. They can feel things out better.”

“Talking about blind people or girls?” I said.

“I’m shocked those eyes even know how to cry,” he said.

We wondered if McCall would come back and stared off towards the house. Past the tennis court, the fire we’d built blazed in flickering miniature. But it was so dark out you couldn’t see the grass, just the tiny, throbbing, apricot-colored light.

“I heard it was a cult up there on Monteagle Mountain,” Blake said. “That’s what happened to those people. They all got sacrificed.”

“Do you believe in the devil?” I said.

“We’re lucky in our church we don’t have to talk about Hell much,” Danny said. “The redneck churches, that’s all they talk about. Those people, they just can’t get enough Hell.”

We watched the fire awhile, then walked to the veranda, where the adults were rollicking and spinning to the Stones’ Through the Past, Darkly.

My mother, she’d brought that CD. A later greatest hits album would’ve been better to dance to. But the adults were liquored up now, so they’d try and dance to just about anything.

Over the mountains, heat lightning flashed like we were having our pictures taken from faraway distances.

McCall sat at the picnic table, encircled by tiki torches, talking with D’Arcy Middleton. D’Arcy was a high school junior, and surely she’d told McCall some of the ugly things she’d heard about. I pictured D’Arcy Middleton and Danny Price in a duel of exchanging horrible knowledge.

Then I looked at the adults and thought: I can’t even imagine.

I leaned toward Danny Price and said, “I bet they wore capes.”

“They who?” he said.

“That cult up on Monteagle Mountain. I bet they wore capes.”

And then later I said, “I can kind of see it. How it could be an act of love.”

On the veranda, the adults danced to “Mother’s Little Helper,” and my father slipped through the French doors into the house and bumped against a toddler-sized wood carving of a black bear. I crept past the dancing crowd, stuck my head through the door, and said, “I could stand to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

“You’ll be all right staying here,” he said.

“I’m scared of this place,” I said.

“Just don’t go queer on me,” he said, and then vanished into the hall.

I went back out. My mother was asleep on an Adirondack chair. Bald-headed Charles Lupton peered into a casserole dish of green bean salad as if he might kill it. A few grown couples held each other in dance as though they feared sudden mortal collapse. Someone had thrown on another CD. “I don’t like you, but I love you,” the singer told me. Down at the picnic table, McCall was still sitting with D’Arcy Middleton and the jeweled Jack Daniel’s bottles. The tiki torches cast her face the same color it was on Sundays, when we’d light candles together for the Eucharist.

“Will you see that bathroom with me?” I asked her. D’Arcy Middleton got up and walked away.

“Why’d she leave?” McCall said. “I’m not interested in any bathroom.”

“I want to know if any of these stories are true,” I said. “The swan-head faucet—that one we can solve right now.”

“The Whaley granddaughter,” she said. “That’s true.”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about that.”

McCall uncapped a Jack Daniel’s bottle and turned it up, pulled an impressive slug, and then thrust the bottleneck into my chest. “I’m over it,” she said.

“You can’t drink that,” I said. “You smell like my dad.”

“Take a drink with me and we’ll look at your weird bathroom.”

“You’re cockeyed,” I said.

“That’s not fair,” she said.

She was right. I took a drink.

We slipped through the French doors and into the house. My face felt all downslung from that liquor I’d never had before. McCall stopped stiff and pointed at the toddler-sized black bear carving, then felt its face as if to knead it into a different creature altogether. The bear wore red lipstick and smiled with long, painted, piano-key teeth.

“It’s a carving of a black boy,” she said.

“It’s a bear carving,” I said. “A lot of people have them. Why would anybody carve a black boy?”

“They think it’s okay because it’s an antique.”

I couldn’t stop looking at those teeth. I was distrustful of them. I was so distrustful I could hardly take it. And I said to McCall, “How in the hell do you give a cow a root canal?”

Together, creeping along the hall, I said, “The dark doesn’t make a difference for you.” But she said she knew everything, could feel every shadow and even feel color, but I told her that was impossible. She told me to be quiet, the spirits in the house are hearing. So I told her to be quiet, if that’s the case, and that I wanted to believe in such things and did not look forward to the day I stopped believing.

The door to the master bedroom was open a crack, and a bar of yellow light burned into the hallway.

“That’s the bed where they slept,” she said. “The dentist and his wife. I wonder what drove him crazy.”

“There’s someone here,” I said. “The light’s on, if you don’t know.”

“I’ve already explained to you that I know.”

“The bathroom light’s on, too.”

“I know,” she said.

I eased open the bathroom door. The enormous bathtub was empty. A gold swan-head faucet curved like a swan’s neck, and the hot and cold handles fanned out like wings. “So, go ahead and turn it on,” she said.

I eased the door wide open, and in front of the mirror stood Marie Lupton, touching up her red lipstick, hair piled in a bun now, but her eyes were closed, and behind Marie Lupton my father was squatting, his hands hoisting the hem of her skirt, his face buried into her rear end, his mouth working and nodding his head as if to say: Yes. Most certainly. And even though I knew I didn’t need to, I covered McCall’s eyes. I watched Marie’s face in the mirror. She was really enjoying herself.

In the mirror, her eyes met mine and she dropped her tube of lipstick on the tile floor, and I grabbed McCall’s hand. “We’ve got to run,” I said.

Out on the veranda, my mother stood leaning over the banister and smoking a cigarette, peering out into the distance where flickering heat lighting took your picture.

“See anything?” my mother asked me. “You done yet?”

“Done with what?” I said.

She turned again to the lightning.

Charles Lupton still stood threatened by the green bean salad. No music played. Blake lay sleeping in his mother’s arms on an Adirondack chair, and D’Arcy Middleton and Danny Price stood engaged in what looked like that duel of exchanging horrible knowledge, Danny’s hands flying all over the place. D’Arcy Middleton looked over at McCall and me. “You’re going to hell,” I told her.

Why did I say that to her? I told McCall, “Let’s get that whiskey bottle.”

Down at the picnic table, I knocked over a tiki torch getting to the bottle, and then I took McCall’s hand again, but she took the bottle from me, and I followed her.

The fire we’d made still blazed out beyond the tennis court, and we ran toward it, fat walnuts underfoot. I could feel them crumbling beneath me, my feet not as tender as they’d been just a few hours ago.

“You didn’t see it,” I told her. “You didn’t see anything.”

“You’re out of breath,” she said. “Must’ve been scary. See any ghosts?”

“I’m not scared of anything.”

“So you like this stuff?”

“I think so,” I said. I stole the bottle from her and took another pull. “You didn’t see it happen,” I said.

I’d had no idea that later we’d fall asleep there, by the fire. That the next morning my father would drive my mother and me home in his topless ‘67 Bronco, swerving all the way home on a residual drunk, not a word shared between them. And that on Sunday, I’d be in my red-and-white cassock, with McCall, as acolytes, lighting the candles up on the altar, and the adults would be kneeling at the communion rail, hands held out for the Eucharist as if begging for the sweet port wine, the unleavened bread. Everything would appear to be as it had been before.

McCall slung her arm around me, and I thought: if I had to get married early—too young, but at gunpoint—I’d be all right with marrying her.

“If we weren’t so young,” McCall said, “we could have sex.”

“I really do like this stuff,” I said, and took another drink. “Danny Price says we’re lucky we don’t have to talk about Hell much.”

“The Catholics have confession,” she said. “That’s the big difference with us and the Catholics.”

“I’m surprised this thing’s kept burning as long as it has,” I said.

Over beyond the mountains, the heat lightning had ceased, and someone had turned off all the lights on the veranda and snuffed out the tiki torches, and it was just me and her and our fire, and for a moment there I didn’t feel any fear for anything.

“Can you imagine?” she said. “Having to do a confession?”

But I sat staring into the fire as if it’d burn out at any time, last one I’d ever see.

“Did you hear me? I asked you: Can you imagine?”

“No,” I said.

Soon after Time Out of Mind rang back to life that cathedral bell in his wandering mind — his Genius Zone, or whatever you want to call it — Bod Dylan made some moves.

Whatever you want to call it: the Zone is what makes somebody extraordinary, a conjurer, knocking down just a peg peers like John Prine and Joni and Leonard Cohen and the Rain Dog and a raft of other troubadours and American chroniclers who wear that Legend hat. It’s whatever part of his mind rendered him capable of magicking art that defined a time — the folky early and mid-Sixties (and all of the Sixties, for that matter) — and a place, a scene (Greenwich Village). But thirty-some-odd years later, after the triumph of Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan’s Genius Zone was back, and he decided it was time to define not an era but a half a century.

It’s impossible to get to the bottom of how in the hell he went from Woody Guthrie-acolyte to electric late-Sixties Rock’n’Roller — shoulder-to-shoulder with them British bad boys the Rolling Stones — to a soft country music phase (while everyone else was getting psychedelic), to a spottier ‘70s (and the confessional masterwork Blood On the Tracks) and then to his Christian Zone, and then an occasionally brilliant yet artistically stunted Dinosaur Zone in the ‘80s and early ‘90s… and then to what he’s done now, somewhat unnoticed, in our modern times.

Somewhat unnoticed, because it’s doubtful the new generation of Dylan-lovers or at least the Dylan-curious beget by the recent Timothée Chalamet vehicle A Complete Unknown are queuing up Tempest and Rough and Rowdy Ways on Spotify. They’re queuing up The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Highway 61 Revisited. (That’s if listening to whole albums front-to-back is still even a thing.) In any case, that’s great. A mainstream cultural boon for our country’s last living mondo bard is, well, just a damn good thing for the culture.

If you’re not a professional music critic (and I am not) or kind of old (not yet!), you probably don’t know a whole hell of a lot of people who are even remotely aware that Bob Dylan’s studio output between 1997 and 2020 easily rivals his run in the Sixties. If we’re talking in years, it’s not even close.

But let’s be fair and weigh these epochs of glory in twenty year increments: the early Sixties through the Seventies; the turn of the new millennium through 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. If we’re talking about numbers of recognized “classic albums,” then, sure, the ‘60s and ‘70s Dylan whips the dogshit out of New Dylan: Freewheelin’, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, the Basement Tapes, Blood On the Tracks, and the second-tier joys of Nashville Skyline, Desire, Another Side of Bob Dylan, and John Wesley Harding. New Morning, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and Self Portrait have their moments. Many moments. And many moments unplumbed. Bob Dylan produced so much great music in this era it is almost unreal.

But Bob Dylan in the Sixties and, truly, all the way till his artistic renaissance at the turn of the millennium, was an artist in flux. Completely unfastened to a defining artistic pursuit. A complete unknown indeed, and even to himself.

Many writers can recall their early poems and stories. Maybe you were in your early twenties. You’re consuming all these new ideas, new voices, new forms, excited by the magic of the Romantic poets and Shakespeare and Moby-Dick and Modernist fiction. The Sound and the Fury butts up against John Keats and To the Lighthouse and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and what the hell are you supposed to do with all that? You’re getting high and you’re falling in love and breaking hearts and breaking your own. There’s a wild new world and there was the world before it and you are not moving with it so much as it’s cycloning about you and you produce your early work in a psychedelic haze. Dylan, in his 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley, explains that his early songs were “almost magically written.” He quotes from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” and then he dares us, dares himself: “Try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that … It’s a different kind of penetrating magic … I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can’t do that.”

He moved on from the magical prose of “It’s Alright, Ma” rather quickly. Rapidly shifting into other zones. Sure, his choices in the Sixties could be glorified as pure rebellion, and I’m down with that notion. The illusion of cool is necessary for the diet, and I’ll eat it whenever anybody with a microphone or a typewriter’s got it. But he was really not as much a rebel as a searcher. For the most part, our most enigmatic and interesting artist of the past hundred years took almost forty years to find his true voice. Writers of poetry and fiction can sympathize. Most musicians cannot. They bang out their best work young and if they don’t burn out they fade away.

Dylan, being a literary practitioner as much as a song-and-dance-man — a chronicler, if you will — found his true voice not with his late career breakout Time Out of Mind (still a perfect album, the deliriously beautiful “Not Dark Yet” a top contender for Best Dylan Song) but did so a few years later, producing his own work under the pseudonym Jack Frost, and released an album that is a pastiche of early Twentieth Century Southern music and Vaudeville and everything, everything Old, Weird America-y and even pre-Rockabilly, the cultural wellspring from which the young Bob Dylan and his Sixties peers emerged.

A chronicler, Dylan figured out in the new millennium that his true calling was to be a pastiche-man, the only Twenty-first Century aging bard just genius and laser-focused enough to cook it all up and distill it. And so he, of course, went deep into the American South. A midwestern boy, Robert Zimmerman wasn’t born the most likely candidate. But Dylan learned long ago that — and boy did he have to keep working for it — the most American thing you could do was wipe the slate clean. Many try it. But Dylan is better than all of us because he took that distinctly American notion of personal reinvention and affixed it solely upon the pursuit of artistic mastership.

As the Twenty-first Century began, Bob Dylan was finally ready. Ready to define, and pay homage to, the prior century from which he took shape. And to define a place: The American South. Because Bob Dylan knew, as the Rolling Stones did with Exile On Main Street, that all great American music largely gestated in the American South, and that while his nascent idol Woody Guthrie wrote ballads and folk tunes and protest music during the horrific 1930s and ‘40s — throughout the Dust Bowl and the Depression and World War II — Dylan knew that something wilder had occurred in the shadow-laden Southern United States, a primal art of personal sorrow and hauntedness and exuberance in the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans and the low-shouldered, brushy mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky and the Cumberland Plateau. In the Wild Country. In the Lost Country.

Love and Theft arrived on the heels of a serious comeback. It had a lot to live up to: Time Out of Mind was better than anything he’d done since Blood On the Tracks. There was a textural darkness to it. Lovelorn and world-weary and confessional. Did I hear someone tell a lie? Did I hear someone’s distant cry? I spoke like a child. You destroyed me with a smile while I was sleeping. Awash in Daniel Lanois’s dreamy, cathedral-noir production style, Time Out of Mind felt more singular and cohesive than much of what he’d done before. There’s a slapdash quality to his best early work, a product of its time and the studio technology available then and Bob’s own youth and wayward spirit, the chain-smoking and the pill-popping. With Lanois, Dylan rendered a record which consistently sounds like a sad, sepia barroom in a disenchanted underwater cave — with mud floors.

Lyrically, it sowed the seeds for what would come next. Alex Ross, in his 1999 New Yorker profile of Dylan, wrote of Time Out of Mind, pointing out that Dylan’s world “manages to skip the twentieth century. Trains discourage gambling, people ride in buggies, there’s no air conditioning (“it’s too hot to sleep”), church bells ring, “gay” means happy, the time of day is measured by the sun, lamps apparently run on gas (and are turned “down low”) and, most of the time, the singer is walking.” True, yet he was hardly skipping the Twentieth Century.

What he was doing was heading down South, a place in which, beyond the turn of the century and through the Depression, church bells were ringing, and people still drove buggies and it was definitely too hot to sleep. And Blind Willie Johnson was lowing and moaning “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” and Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a highway crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and that Lomax boy was racing around with his truck full of gadgets and an enigmatic bluesman named Charley Patton was plucked from the Delta by Paramount Records to lay down “Pony Blues” and “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues” and “Down the Dirt Road Blues.”

Gonna walk down that dirt road, till someone’ll let me ride / Gonna walk down that dirt road, till someone’ll let me ride / If I can’t find my baby I’m gonna run away and hide / Well I’ve been pacing round the room, hopin’ maybe she’ll come back / pacing round the room, hoping maybe she’ll come back / Well I been prayin’ for salvation, layin’ round in a one-room country shack

— Dylan’s “Dirt Road Blues,” Time Out of Mind

Once Dylan dropped Lanois and started producing his own music, and crafting a vision singularly his, he assembled a band whose drummer David Kempler recalls a recording experience in which “you are in the School of Bob … he would bring in … these amazing examples of early Americana … Nobody that I know knows as much about American music as Bob Dylan. He has spent so much time trying to understand, and collecting these songs — it was like a never stopping resource.”

And so Dylan tried on different hats, and eventually wound up being an apolitical collector of musical ephemera, and, due to his outrageous talent, was able to compose a synthesis of Americana art, not just the Southern music of the early Twentieth Century, but a lyrical odyssey upon which vagabonds and barkers and boxcar hoppers and Mardi Gras paraders and outlaws and the lovelorn lost souls and Kerouacian road romantics and ramblers and card-sharks and Tweedly Dum and Tweedly Dee and that backstabbing phony Mr. Goldsmith and duck-trapping granddads and folks who’ve “got a cravin’ love for blazin’ speed got a hopped up Mustang Ford” (he’s got eight carburetors, and boys he’s usin’ ‘em all) — the souls of the Old Weird America roamed here, upon a land in which coffins dropped in the street like balloons made out of lead and the fog’s so thick you can’t spy the land.

The music itself is as carnivalesque as Bob’s rambunctious, learned and wickedly witty lyrical ziplines — as kaleidoscopic yet far more focused than “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “It’s Alright, Ma” and “Tombstone Blues” — firing a forge in which Delta and Jump Blues and Tin Pan Alley and Rockabilly and Western Swing and swoony Jazz all form a distinct blade wielded by a man method acting in pencil mustaches and a Boss of the Plains hat and a Western-cut leisure suit: Dylan Revisited.

In Love and Theft’s opening track “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” the music fades in, like the album itself emerging from a paper lantern-lit bayou bog; a conga-like percussive rumble and a fat, driving humbucked boogie-woogie lick sets the streetcar named desire down the long highway of Bob Dylan’s new, cantankerous and variegated masterclass of Americana. His vocals surface, tactfully reverberated, a croaking daemon trickster of the Lost Highway, some whole new iteration who’s tossed the frayed, weary voice of Time Out of Mind in the trash and risen up rumbling and tumbling and cackling and crooning with incredible authority, and perfectly calibrated — a master of the long vowel, Bobby utilizing, as always, his voice as an instrument. The lyrics almost wouldn’t matter if they weren’t so good.

As he would continue to do on its follow-up Modern Times, and, barring his detour into Sinatra standards, on all his proper studio albums ending (for now) with Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan peppers his lyrics with references to a cornucopia of literature and music and public figures that defined that most undefinable (and defining) era of this vast, weird country.

In “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” our vagabond namesake characters are “…going to the country, they’re gonna retire, they’re taking a streetcar named desire” and one says to the other “His Master’s Voice is calling me” and the narrator’s got “rain beating down on my window pane, I got love for you and it’s all in vain” — in the space of a couple of minutes Dylan references Tennessee Williams, Robert Johnson and Francis Barraud’s painting “His Master’s Voice,” an 1889 work in which a small white dog sticks its snout into the bell of a gramophone, which would later become the iconic logo for the Victor Talking Machine in 1900 and thereafter RCA Victor’s vinyl pressings. It’s that nod to Barraud’s painting which is the key to the album, a key to Dylan.

What better way to introduce the mission of Love and Theft than a sly, unnoticeable nod to an 1889 painting — and how unpretentious; he could’ve referenced Monet or Cézanne or Modigliani or Picasso — a painting that became a piece of early analog recording iconography, and remained so well into modern times. It’s unnoticeable because Dylan’s turn of phrase seems to point towards something biblical (and, for us, it surely does), a message from God: His Master’s Voice is calling me, said Tweedly Dumb to Tweedly Dee. You’d think it’s something metaphysically grand and yet what Dylan’s done is grander. This is his religion.

The album’s second track, “Mississippi,” would be almost perturbingly exquisite if it wasn’t so moving. It’s a literary masterclass in structure and restraint and movement and dynamism, told in the first person by a romantic tramp who “got here followin’ the Southern Star” who’d “crossed that river just to be where you are.” Sonically, it’s a mid-tempo walk down that lonesome road in which Dylan’s vocals are so expertly modulated — the long, croaking, snide vowels impossible to describe — and so imbued with incandescent longing and wisdom and well-traveled derring-do, that the in-the-pocket tact of his band is almost an afterthought upon the first few listens. It is an astonishing achievement in craftsmanship, and a sober follow-up to a rollicking opening track whose inaugural lines depict two vaudevillian psychopaths traveling with “two big bags of dead man’s bones” with their noses to the grindstone. Juxtaposed against “Tweedle Dee & Tweddle Dum,” “Mississippi” establishes Love and Theft’s tight-rope balance between raucousness and elegance.

I will not describe the rest of the album song for song, not in much detail. A Master’s thesis could be written of “High Water (for Charley Patton)” (on what, I don’t know), but I’ve only described briefly the two opening tracks’ grandeur to convey what must be ascertained by listening to the album in full, and with full attention: Love and Theft is Dylan’s masterpiece. His Master’s Voice is Calling Thee.

The great writer, musician and music historian Elijah Wald might give me a scolding for over-praising, and thus romanticizing, Dylan — an artist who should not be cheapened as some mythical figure. Rather, Dylan is a uniquely skilled writer and composer and self-taught music scholar, and ought to be considered in that regard. And that’s a notion with which I’m in full agreement. The achievement of Love and Theft is pure handiwork and finesse. And this is why his modern work is more accomplished than his “magical” writings of yesteryear.

Wald, in books like Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, does an admirable job demystifying Delta legends of the ‘20s and ‘30s — like Robert Johnson, who “was not a demon-harried oddity from the primeval delta, but a brilliant and savvy pop musician, and he deserves to be respected as such, rather than worshiped as a weird rock deity.” Yet Wald admits that “in some ways the myths are just as important as the reality.” Dylan understands this as well, and it’s the Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the devil, and the inevitable mythologizing of an era which must occur by the distance of a hundred years, that gives his lyrics and compositions their color and verve and wildness. It gives us hope that something stranger, something more artful and surreal roils beneath the surface of that which can always be reduced to a non-fictive over-realism under more academic scrutiny. The mystery beneath, that’s what the music’s here for. Film. Fiction.

In his pursuit of demystification, Wald also points out that many Black Delta musicians of the era were only more fastened to the blues by pressures of the industry and our own modern romanticization of them, of specters like Charley Patton.

Remembered by history as a blues musician, Patton had grown up in the pre-blues era, and he played the full range of music required by a popular rural entertainer … only about half of his roughly fifty records can reasonably be considered part of [the blues]. The others are a mix of gospel and religious music, ragtime comedy … and a couple of unclassifiable pieces that seem to be his reimaginings of Tin Pan Alley pop …

This was not a particularly unusual repertoire for the time and place. Back in those days before recorded entertainment, rural musicians were expected to perform whatever their audiences cared to hear, and many of them mastered an extraordinary range of styles …

Dylan gets this one too. Whether Love and Theft’s pursuit is one of homage to folks like Patton, or an attempt at kinship — to be a peer amongst his heroes — Dylan achieves this more faithfully than most for the album’s breadth of styles, styles conjured from Patton’s lifecycle. The swingy ballad “Po’ Boy” (which, characteristic of the album as a whole, contains multitudes: references to Shakespeare’s Othello and a Vaudevillian knock-knock joke), the apocalyptic bluegrass of “High Water (For Charley Patton)” (which, notably, is bereft of any apparent blues styling yet dedicated to Patton nonetheless, giving credence to Wald’s thesis), the breezy, brushy, Billie Holiday-style jazz and pre-rock pop of “Bye and Bye” and “Moonlight,” and then there’s the unclassifiably weird “Floater (Too Much to Ask),” which borrows melodies and motifs from Bing Crosby. “Sugar Baby” cops its title from Appalachian folk singer Dock Boggs. “Summer Days” plays like a mashup of Rockabilly and Western Swing. The only true blues stompers on the record are “Cry a While,” “Lonesome Day Blues,” and perhaps the ripping “Honest With Me.” Across a span of fifty-seven minutes, Dylan covers a hell of a lot of ground.

The big caveat here is that Love and Theft is a masterpiece, yet it’s not everyone’s masterpiece. And a great argument can be made — and most often will be made — for the primacy of early Dylan. To adore Love and Theft and Modern Times and Together Through Life and Tempest and Rough and Rowdy Ways you have to be looking for it.

It is the selfsame pursuit by which Dylan conjures his late-period American epics: a lust for American roots music, and for a country’s mysteries and oddities and absurdities and a reasonable longing for what Greil Marcus, the granddaddy of the Elijah Walds of the world, coined as “the old, weird America” in Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. This is what Dylan wanted to conquer. If he’d backtracked to his protest days, maybe fallen under the spell of the quarrelsome internet berserkers of the 2010s, he would’ve been well-reviewed but boy it would’ve stunk. (He’s very, very well-reviewed anyway.) You could dismiss him for not doing that, dismiss him as a sociopolitically hush-hush rich old codger sitting in his Malibu mansion (even though this particular old codger really, really deserves to be rich), but that devalues how fully he’s immersed himself in his passions.

Even in his 2022 book The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan completely eschews serious examination of his subjects — sixty-six standards and hidden jewels of the Rock, Pop and Rhythm & Blues canon — in favor of the same prose he uses on his records: authoritative yet colloquial, old fashioned and stingingly witty. He’s not even method acting anymore in that cowboy suit. Maybe he never was. Here is how he begins to unpack “Blue Suede Shoes”:

This song is the handwriting on the wall, loaded with menacing meaning — a signal to gate crashers, snoops, and invaders — keep your nose out of here, mind your own business and whatever you do stay away from my shoes.

You’d like to be on good footing with everyone, but let’s face it, there’s a harshness to your nature that might go unsuspected and it can be downright nasty when it comes to your shoes. Especially when it comes to your shoes.

Your shoes are your pride and joy, sacred and dear, your reason for living, and anyone who scrapes or bruises them is putting himself into jeopardy, accidentally or out of ignorance it doesn’t matter. It’s the one thing in life you won’t forgive. If you don’t believe me, step on them by all means — you won’t like what happens.

For this, The Philosophy of Modern Song is wildly hilarious. Perturbing to some.

In her Los Angeles Times review, Jody Rosen complains that “‘philosophy’ is a useful term, vague and baggy enough to accommodate the mix of music criticism, beat poetry, wolverine snarls and Lear-on-the-heath tirades that comprise the book’s 66 chapters about 66 songs … The Philosophy of Modern Song has its own wild flavor. It is — for better and, alas, worse — a special kind of bonkers.”

Sounds dynamite. But I get it. It does prove, however, that the new Dylan, the cowboy trickster musicologist Dylan, is, finally, exactly who is, exactly who he was born to be. His own version of himself.

In Philosophy, Dylan’s playing a similar role to that of Harry Smith, gonzo mystic-bohemian-addled-Einstein musicologist who’d compiled the seminal and wildly influential Anthology of American Folk Music, in which he prefaced each track conjured up from the underbelly of 78RPMs from the ‘20s and ‘30s with old newspaper headline-style one-liners and zingers like “ZOOLOGIC MISCEGENY ACHIEVED IN MOUSE-FROG NUPTUALS, RELATIVES APPROVE” for “Froggy Went A-Courtin’”.

There’s a wit and stream-of-consciousness frivolity to the Philosophy of Modern Song which renders Dylan-the-author as of a piece with his subjects, their time and place — just as he did with the Band and their basement tapes, that collections of rambunctious roots music recorded covertly in the basement of Big Pink during the Summer of Love, nineteen hundred and sixty-seven, The Basement Tapes the true scrim against which Dylan’s modern folkways crusade rollicks along. Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic (or, as it’s now been reissued, The Old, Weird America) goes into illuminating detail, concerning the record’s place in Bob Dylan’s canon as the springboard for his ongoing elan for that certain music of the old, weird America.

Starting with Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft, there was no real Self Portrait or Street-Legal, no true misfires — or even a New Morning or John Wesley Harding, good albums in their own right but far from Highway 61 Revisited or Blood On The Tracks. I’m not claiming Christmas In the Heart is a masterpiece, but of his proper studio albums, new batches of original material, there’s nothing short of that. Time Out of Mind. Love and Theft. Modern Times. Tempest. Rough and Rowdy Ways. Masterpiece, masterpiece, masterpiece, masterpiece, masterpiece. (Not to belabor the point.) The possible exception is Together Through Life, whose songs were written in collaboration with the Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter, which still showcases Dylan in peak form.

His most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, seals the deal. As accomplished as Love and Theft and Modern Times, the album drives that hopped-up Mustang Ford into an expansion of Dylan’s late period territory, welcoming into the ballroom Frankenstein and Anne Frank and the Scarface Pacino and Philosopher Pirates and obviously Jimmy Reed gets a ticket and so does John F. Kennedy’s corpse, not unlike its predecessor Tempest, which welcomed Jack and Rose from Titanic. With this whole fucking Twilight Zone of poems and dusty 45s and frayed dust jackets and politicians and old Universal pictures and celebrities swirling about his wandering mind you’ve got to wonder if it’s even possible to get to the bottom of how it all works and what he’s actually doing.

He is riding that Mystery Train, is what he’s doing. Along with Elvis and Charley Patton and the Singing Brakeman and Jack and Rose and the ghost of John F. Kennedy. The Mystery Train’s sixteen coaches long and it rambles alongside the misty backroads of the Old, Weird America and it makes many stops. In the dark room of Big Joe Turner’s mind. Sometimes it drives farther back in time, picking up notes from Homer and Ovid. Then picking up speed. If you ride the Mystery Train you can always come back but you can’t come back all the way.

You’ve been shackled by the Phantom Conductor and it might be the man in pencil mustaches and a Boss of the Plains hat. Once formally known as Zimmerman. Dylan and Jack Frost. Whatever phantom shape he chooses once His Master’s Voice comes calling.

Old Soul Dog

New Dog soared slung-bellied over the split-rail fence and beat hell out of the wind, and dove off the dock with a dead rabbit in his or her — no, quick! Study the undercarriage, his — mouth, this occurring while we gassed up that old trashed jet ski borrowed from Mr. Hurley. Iridescent gasoline on the water spread into a birthmark shape and forked around the hull. New Dog swam into the color-changing splatter like some special heavenly dog and ejected the dead rabbit out its mouth. Good dog.

Fetch that bunny out the water, Carp told me.

My friend Carp got the nickname from his mom ‘cause he was the gruesomest baby she’d ever seen, come out of her own inner chamber, but never did get better looking. A red birthmark splashed Carp’s back sized like all of Eurasia, but his mom couldn’t admit the mark had been fired upon his flesh via blood of her own — Nothing ugly came from my blood! she’d cry. That’s his shit-ass daddy! — because she’d been a pageant girl in McMinn County and had once even dated the great handsome quarterback Rory Brock in high school. She hurled out this historical detail at every social event at some point so as to let everybody and their sisters and babies know she’d once been a debutante. What happened?

Okay. I fetched up this dead rabbit from the water. We finished gassing the jet ski and idled over to the dock and Carp heaved up and got ahold of a bright blue stringer and his pocketknife, the one with his dad’s initials etched into the steel in the Olde English style. Carp hook-mouthed the rabbit and plunged the knifepoint into its jowl, carving fish gills. Black blood pooled thick-paint-like over its scratchy brown coat. He stuck the bright blue stringer through the rabbit’s mouth and yanked it out of a bloodied gill and clinched it to the U-bolt off the back of the jet ski.

We went for a ride out on the slough towing the rabbit like a little bitty bunny tuber.

Old Dogs beheld us at bank’s edge yipping and snapping their jaws forever young yet their fresh accomplice New Dog the Rabbit Hunter was not a convert to their happy bemused little reckonings.

You see I know a lot of words, but I’m still stupid.

My folks thought me either the brains of the family or a complete ‘numb nuts,’ or at least sometimes that’s what my Dad called me. I’d become the celebrity of the school spelling bee; they didn’t know where it came from. But I didn’t put any value on that and thought maybe they ought to concern themselves with matters of higher significance and just I’d turn out however I’d turn out. Right now I just wanted to haul out a large-scale-rodent deathcart in miniature across the green summer sparkle of Tennessee water.

New Dog was not a convert because he was sad for how we’d treated the rabbit post-mortem. By god he’d killed it, yet he respected it. You could tell by the way he just lay there looking sullen and droop-lipped. He was not as lowbrow as these old dancing dogs who had never learned, in all their expansive, compacted dog years, how to self-reflect and doglike catch the scent of and hunt down and tear apart cruelty and meanness, an Old Soul Dog much further advanced than they.

Miss Traylor and her little daughters, who lived on the corner of the slough, stood by the bank looking very upset. Miss Traylor was a ghoul, like most people, sunup to sundown just dead drunk off invented petty concerns.

We’d got back from our procession on the beat-looking jet ski and Miss Traylor was yelling at Dad with her arms flying around.

Instead of untying the stringer Carp just drew his knife out and cut it loose. The rabbit floated away with this bright blue string coming out its mouth. Drifting away like he’d wanted to tell us something, to tell us something in sheer bright blue, but it never turned into the bright blue bubble where you’d read his words like you did in the Sunday funnies.

Truth be told we had made the little Traylor girls cry. Dad called Carp’s Mom over and told her to take care of Carp and then Dad took me up to the porch where he kept a thick sheath of palm leaves in the corner for decoration, like a beach house thing. He yanked my trunks down and lifted the palm leaves and rocketed my rear with a red wrath that never stopped and never stopped —

Numb nuts numb nuts numb nuts.

Afterwards he and my mother sat at the kitchen table pouring spiked iced tea from a pitcher.

I was so angry with New Dog. Everything was his fault. I had to find him and let him know he’d ruined my day, bringing this dead large-scale-rodent into my life. That’s right: I didn’t see it as a pretty little bunny but like some glorified donkey-eared rat come out of a sewer somewhere to hurl a wrench in my existence.

I came upon the new dog like hot hell with my little watersock: You little stinking ass face-fuck-dick! I’ll kill you! I got him in the face with it. He was nothing but a mutt, ugly as Carp, though lean-boned and crisp under the summer sun’s heaven. Again, I watersocked him in the face. But New Dog leapt and double-paw shoved me and I collapsed all over the hot grass. He bit my titty. I’d changed my opinion of him. I preferred Old Dogs with their slack-jawed lack of world-care and principles.

We had, Carp and me, given the old dogs names. There was Scab Ass, and Ribbit — ‘cause he had a frog face — and Mr. Crow, a tar-black dog who had earned our respect ‘cause he’d lick your hands and face with a breath that didn’t make you feel dipped in vomit. Then there was the mega-old dog Gurgle, who made awful sounds with his throat while he snuffled at the grass.

Old Dogs joined that night for the cookout with Carp and his mom and me and Dad and Mom and Mr. Hurley and his grandson Christopher — a big old boy with sawdust-colored hair and eyes set far apart like Ribbit’s — who, earlier that day, had hooked into this giant turtle with his rig, a chicken liver tied to a yellow milk jug. Mom fried crappie and big chunks of turtle meat. She made hush puppies and what she called twice-fried French fries. She made cocktail sauce so heavy with horseradish it was bright orange as her garden daylilies.

Can Carp stay over? I kept saying.

Dad said, No you can’t cause you been acting like a little shit-ass numb nuts, but Mom told him we didn’t know any better and then they got into some kind of a serious talking match but Mom won because he’s a fool with words and she’s where I got mine.

Carp’s mom had had too many and talked about all the experiences of her youth and how advanced she had become at such an early stage and how you couldn’t take that from anybody.

I dipped a great wad of turtle meat into the pale orange cocktail sauce with the smell so strong it opened up your whole face like some big wind got in there making you clean again.

My rear end still stung a little from the stack of palm leaves, but Carp and me had the bedroom window flown open. Outside was icy black. New Dog skittered darkly somewhere in the tall trees.

I listened for the crackling feet of creatures. I peered out into the fanged night.

Carp, my friend, fell into some serious snoring, like his dreams were boiling out of his skull.

I could hear the heat of my father laying with my mother in the other room.

I heard a snuffling. I shoved my face out the window. New Dog, below — he spun and he danced like he’d come to give me some kind of reckoning to keep, to fling inside me like a sword.

He skittered away on the black ground. To harry the trees, to fly the split-rail fence. I cried out to him: Come here, boy. Come, friend.

New Dog, he just kept on dancing and dancing and dancing with the blue spirits of rabbits. I watched. It doesn’t really matter if it’s real or not, that’s the secret.

I open my mouth so as to cry forth every ounce of air in my body toward New Dog and the Dancing Ghost Rabbit.

Suddenly the breath inside me came and cut out my tongue.

Lynch was maybe just a few months old when his family packed up and shuttled off to Boise, Idaho and Spokane, Washington and then Virginia. He studied fine arts in Boston, Philadelphia, and then the AFI Conservatory in LA, working on Eraserhead. He was from everywhere, and so fashioned his first feature from nowhere. A cold industrial nightmarescape set to a staticky pitch, the clanging gait of heavy machinery.

Eventually his works would inhabit — or be inhabited by — the bucolic spaces of his boyhood: the small town North Carolina of Blue Velvet, the Pacific Northwest simulacrum of Twin Peaks. It took some time getting there: his second feature, The Elephant Man, in nineteenth century England; the planet Arrakis in Dune — whose commercial failure gave Lynch the jolt he’d needed to venture out into his own world again, writing his own screenplay with no textual source material except his own mind.

Into the suburban 1950s of his youth. And the music that emerged in the era, from the fringes of his milieu. The tidal colossus of Rock’n’Roll flooding the mainstream countrywide, the shadow-laden private eyes and femme fatales skulking luridly about Lynch’s otherworldly and grainy, convex television screen like transmissions from some alien planet Earth of Danger and Weirdness.

Out of which he’d created something singular and signature. Blue Velvet setting the feng shui by which his name became an adjective.

A few years after Blue Velvet, Lynch discovered a textual source he could get down with, by a writer — born the same year — who’d grown up in motel rooms between Chicago and New Orleans. A rare artist whose material could help furnish Lynch’s vision as much as Billy Wilder and Luis Bañuel and coffee and cherry pie.

Barry Gifford is an outsider. After a boyhood of transience — raised by a liquor-running racketeer cavorting with gangsters, pimps and showgirls — Gifford attended the University of Missouri on a baseball scholarship. He dropped out, became a merchant seaman in Europe just because he felt like it, settling in London for a time in the mid-sixties and then Haight-Ashbury San Francisco, hanging with small-time rock’n’rollers on the cutting edge of the psychedelic scene. A self-made bibliophile, Gifford nourished himself with the Beats.

Like Denis Johnson — born just three years after — Gifford’s appetite for the ethos of Neal Cassady and American weirdness and darkness led him first to poetry.

Just a hair more privileged than Gifford, Denis Johnson was the son of a roving U.S. State Department liaison. Johnson clearly suffered his own darkness, but Gifford was borne of the Real Thing.

Johnson dabbled in Weird America — and did so most fully in his four enduring works, in four different forms: the poetry of The Incognito Lounge, his debut novel Angels, the short stories of Jesus’ Son and the novella Train Dreams. (Johnson, a chameleon, followed Neal Cassady’s dictum: Life goes into new forms.) Gifford’s work never quite reaches these heights of lyrical brilliance, but Gifford — a devoted acolyte of film noir as much as Beat poetics and spirit — has spent much of his career headlong into the smoky depths of American Shadow and Grime.

By the time he’d composed the novel Wild at Heart: the Story of Sailor and Lula, Gifford had crafted a wholly original Americana Berserko, a noir-dripping yet almost cartoonish rendering of this country’s crooks, runaways, gangsters, romantics and freaks. Its heroic legion of lost souls.

Wild at Heart: the Story of Sailor and Lula was published six years after Johnson’s Angels. Johnson’s is a story of wayward lovers on a cross-country Greyhound ride through a bleak, hallucinatory country of black-lit drug dens and bars in which “men drank alone, staring out of their faces.” There’s a bumbling-bro bank robbery scene gone terribly awry, strikingly similar to that which occurs in Wild at Heart. It’s fun to think about what might’ve been had Lynch chosen Johnson’s book instead.

In the eighties, Denis Johnson, an Iowa Writer’s Workshop alum, was creeping towards the literary darling status he’d achieve with Jesus’ Son, but along the way Denis — whose output, despite his horrific talent, was wildly inconsistent — had followed up Angels with the loping post-apocalyptic Fiskadoro. Meanwhile Gifford was holed up at a motel off the mouth of the Cape Fear River, working on a book about sport fishing. While writing, voices of a young couple sifted through the walls, igniting his imagination. Gifford, ever the outsider, threw out the fishing book, sent back his advance and started working on Wild at Heart.

Just a year after Gifford’s novel was published, Wild at Heart was booed by the audience at Cannes — while Lynch just stood there grinning — yet won its prestigious Palm d’Or.

The story in between is a simple one: Lynch read the novel, loved it, and gave Gifford a call. Lynch had asked Gifford to write the screenplay, but Gifford was busy working on its sequel. He told Lynch, “You write it and send me the screenplay and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.”

What’s exhilarating about Gifford’s and Lynch’s brand is its gaudy fusion of schlock and deep artistic feeling. And an unceasing current of humor that, when encountered for the first time, might seem puzzlingly childish or self-mocking — or worse, hateful of its people.

And then these people crush you. Crush you with their awe and terror and love. Made more powerful by the whole hammy put-on. You giggle and you roll your eyes. And then you cry. You realize you’ve been had. You know what these haute American barkers are getting up to now.

It’s all shot through some neon-surreal telescope, precisely expressing some crazed amalgamation of American Weirdness. All cooked up in a potful of twentieth century lore: Doo Wop and Rock’n’Roll, Beat poetry, carny culture, Eisenhower-era suburban sheen and its underbelly of barroom burlesques, ramblers and gamblers and soot-blacked troubadours and road warriors; the selfsame amalgamation which informs Bob Dylan’s post-Time Out of Mind output, the Vaudevillian wallop and stomp of his late-period masterpiece Love and Theft. All achievements made possible by a century’s worth of absurdities.

It’s difficult to say anything new about anything unless you make something up. I call it Rockabilly Noir. It’s been crawling all over my brain while I’ve been thinking about this, and I doubt I’m the first person who’s ever thought of it. Heretofore I’ve not encountered it, so I’ll use it.

Say it with me now: Rockabilly Noir. Bumpa-ditty-bumpa-ditty-blappity-pow! Rockabilly Noir! Sounds good!

Rockabilly emerged smack in the middle of the twentieth century with a frenzied exuberance drawn from all manner of cultural ephemera: Hank Williams and Black Fashion and velvety shoes and Delta Blues and pomade and Arthur Crudup and Bill Monroe and the Jitterbug and amphetamines, polka dots and leather jackets; it gave rise to Sun Records and practitioners like Elvis Presley and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, artists whose sheer flamboyance was unprecedented and then unfathomable still. This kind of radical swagger set the table for Gifford and Lynch and even Johnson — and Nicolas Cage, the Elvis-obsessed Sailor Ripley of Wild at Heart, Cage the Elvis-loving, quintessential American Berserko of acting.

The last American Berserko actor. And David Lynch is dead. And Denis Johnson is dead. And Barry Gifford is old.

One hopes that Timothee Chalamet will take some piece of Bob Dylan with him — there’s already evidence that he has — and it’d be good if he went just a little bit crazy from it, just a little bit crazy.

It’s a rarer thing than in film: for a book to express the exuberance and madness and buffoonery of the carny or the young Elvis Presley. The Wild at Heart series (there are seven) does it, and Gifford’s Night People, another slim, gritty Berserko Southern Noir. There are characters with names like Big Betty and Cutie Early and Bosco Brulliard — Bosco Brulliard! These are strutting pink ponies amid a literary pasture populated by high manners aplenty — addled Rockabilly gusto in short supply.

Who are all these other Rockabilly Noirists? You might be wondering that. Must be a bunch of stinkers. Skulking in alleyways smoking off Stinker Street. High off their own snake oil yet certainly not high on the hog.

But what will you do when they come for your hogs?

Here’s a conversation from Night People in which Big Betty and Cutie drive the Lost Highway in Betty’s black Dodge Monaco:

“Travelin’ along the way we are, without no home or reason to be or stay anywhere, that’s what it means bein’ on the lost highway. Most folks don’t know what they want, Cutie, only mostly they don’t even know that much. Sometimes they think they know but it’s usually just their stomach or cunt or cock complainin’. They get fed or fucked and it’s back to square one. Money makes ‘em meaner’n shit, don’t we already know. Money’s the greatest excuse in the world for doin’ dirt. But you and me can out-ugly the sumbitches, I reckon.”

“How’s that?”

“Just by puttin’ two and two together, sweet pea, then subtractin’ off the top, one at a time.”

“I ain’t sure I understand you, Bet, but I’m willin’ to learn.”

Big Betty threw back her head, shut her wolfslit green eyes and gave out a sharp laugh.

Gifford’s characters, with “wolfslit” eyes, travel the Lost Highway, out-uglying all the sumbitches and conjuring hatchling crimes while ruminating on what it means to be alive. And doing so with confectionery crude humor and grit, in the parodic manner employed by Lynch. Their techniques are akin to Flannery O’Connor’s, who shone a light upon her characters’ most exaggerated grotesqueries, excavating truths of humanity and ugliness in this world. The reader beholds them shimmering in this country’s grimmer terrains.

Much Rockabilly exuberance comes out of the South and Interior West, of the flyover country: Mississippi authors Barry Hannah and Lewis Nordan juxtaposed caricature and cartoonish violence with great tenderness and psychological realism. Of the West, Thomas McGuane (actually nicknamed, in his wilder days, “Captain Berserko”) transmitted the Rockabilly spirit through his early works, chiefly The Bushwhacked Piano and his screenplay Rancho Deluxe. Hell, anything with a name like Rancho Deluxe has got the spirit to it.

Of the West too E. Annie Proulx writes with a lyrical derring-do fast fading in American fiction, and you can look to Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles for the poetry of transience and American lostness. Seems all the spirit’s coming from The Interior. Make a note of that: look for the spirit in The Interior.

It’d be ridiculous not to mention Kerouac, about whom Gifford co-wrote an “oral biography” called Jack’s Book. Kerouac surely did bop and howl, and there’s an excitement to reading On the Road at, say, twenty. You’re thinking, Whoa, this is some whole new rambler, a party bag of what Tennessee Williams called “something wild in the country that only the night people knew.” But Gifford and Denis Johnson molded the spirit and verve of The Beats into some fresh, more mature thing — maybe “mature” isn’t the right word. After all, we could use a few more boppers and howlers in our midst. But there’s something to be said of the clean line, of the craftsmanship in Johnson’s and Gifford’s prose. As wild as he is, Gifford’s prose is as whittled as a frog-gig.

The Beats are simply source material for the Berserkos, the Rockabilly Noirists — along with Presley and Night of the Hunter and Out of the Past and Patricia Highsmith and snakeskin jackets that symbolize your individuality and sense of personal freedom.

Lynch, on the other hand … I haven’t found any evidence that he held affinity for the Beats. But Lynch was an alien. The director-producer Mel Brooks called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” for his golly-gee-whiz manner and Eisenhower-era Dad persona. His duck-honky brogue. Whatever macabre neon tincture coursed about Lynch’s veins was borne of some other secret thing, some thing I don’t think anybody could ever put a name to. He was certainly an Elvis fan. You can see it in his haircut. A pompadour from Mars.

Spin interviewed Lynch for the release of his album (Lynch was also a musician, of course) — an album called Crazy Clown Time, of course — and he was asked about its “mutated rockabilly feel.”

Spin: How did that music first affect you as a kid?

DL: Like being hit with a truck filled with happiness. It was a thrilling truck, and you know, I sort of wish everybody could experience that feeling. You’ve heard these stories. So many musicians when they saw Elvis for the first time, they just slammed their head with their fist and said, “Damn! This is it!” And it was just suddenly so obvious. It wasn’t there. And then it was there.

A thrilling truck. Denis Johnson, close cousin to Gifford and Lynch, was also haunted by the specter of The King.

Johnson published his masterpiece as a long short story in The Paris Review in 2002. Like Jesus’ Son, it’s a work to which Gifford bears no lyric equal, and matched in brilliance by the most sublime moments in Lynch’s best work (i.e. Club Silencio, part eight of Twin Peaks: The Return).

Train Dreams is the story of a tenderly dimwitted railroader in the early Twentieth Century’s Interior West, wandering about the nation’s wide open spaces and the bizarre interstices thereof, in the wake of personal tragedy. Robert Grainier traverses the rails and ties racing between the pastoral and the new strange America to come. An America in which Grainier would pay ten cents to see the World’s Fattest Man, would witness a Wonder Horse in a theater, the Magnet Boy and the Chicken Boy and the Wolf Boy and an America that would “tremble with a massive inner dynamism.” Later in his life Grainier would behold, in Troy, Montana, “a railway car carrying the strange young hillbilly entertainer Elvis Presley.”

The famous youth had appeared in a window briefly and raised his hand in greeting, but Grainier had come out of the barber shop across the street too late to see this. He’d only had it told to him by the townspeople standing in the late dusk, strung along the street beside the deep bass of the idling diesel, speaking very low if speaking at all, staring into the mystery and grandeur of a boy so high and solitary.

Trains Dreams is elegiac in a way Gifford’s work is not, and is closer to Lynch’s the Straight Story than Wild at Heart. But a shared affinity for the cultural dynamite of rockabilly — and its strutting, pompadoured avatar — informed the voices of two widely heralded American masters (Johnson and Lynch) and an under-appreciated rogue (Gifford).

Johnson’s final work, the collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was, by the author’s dying wishes, unaltered following his death. The book ends with the story “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist,” about an Elvis-obsessed poet who entertains conspiracy theories concerning Elvis’s twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, who’d died at birth — or did he?

The closing line of “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist” — thus the closing words from Denis Johnson — is this: Elvisly Yours.

Johnson was Elvisly aligned with Lynch and Gifford, yet aligned too by his affection for noir. Johnson eclipses Gifford as a stylist, and Gifford eclipses Johnson as a documenter of criminal escapades. But much of Johnson’s spottier work is noir or noir-adjacent. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man is about a suicide survivor turned half-disc-jockey-half-private eye (what’s more Rockabilly Noir than that?), and its opening lines, some of Johnson’s most memorable, are written in the hardboiled, anaphoric language of film noir:

He came there in the off-season. So much was off. All bets were off. The last deal was off. His timing was off, or he wouldn’t have come here at this moment, and also every second arc lamp along the peninsular highway was switched off. He’d been through several states along the turnpikes, through weary tollgates and stained mechanical restaurants, and by now he felt as if he’d crossed a hostile foreign land to reach this fog with nobody in it, only yellow lights blinking and yellow signs wandering past the car’s windows silently.

Off and off and off. You can hear the voice-over narrator in a Forties noir telling in stoic and clipped language that everything was off, and then Johnson slides into his inimitable lyricism — “weary tollgates” and “stained mechanical restaurants” — very much akin to the visual lyricism which heightens Lynch’s work. Its lurid tones and its grotesqueries. Resuscitation’s Leonard English is then “drawn into a very interesting conversation with a man whose face got to look more and more like a dead pig’s face in the dim red light.” This comes just after our narrator exclaims All bets were off. Like Lynch, Johnson effortlessly oscillated between the hardboiled and the darkly surreal.

These three major artists, Lynch and Gifford and Johnson, were acolytes of film noir and the explosive music of the middle Twentieth Century. They pushed this milieu of American Weirdness and Darkness into the stratosphere of tremendous storytelling and poetic beauty. Say it with me aloud again: Rockabilly Noir!

They are guiding lights in the darkness, calling artists to plumb the shadowy depths of what’s mean and gaudy and raucous in America and draw out and nourish what souls are hidden there.

Lynch and Gifford stayed in touch, and really got down together in the mid-1990s, writing the screenplay for a Neo-noir about a stoic yet excitable saxophonist who wakes up in a prison cell — as a different person.

Lost Highway wound up being David Lynch’s most Metal fucking movie. Maybe he thought the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein was the New Dangerous Thing in Rock’n’Roll — a gimp-suited gaggle of Elvis Presleys from Hell. This was Lynch and Gifford’s last ride down the Lost Highway together, and there’s a sense that once it was completed, David just didn’t need Gifford anymore. He’d accumulated all that was required over his career to craft his singular stroke, his Lynchiest of the Lynchy masterwork Mulholland Drive. That movie really settled it: Lynch was Lynch, and Lynchian was simply of Lynch. He took The King, Kiss Me Deadly, Barry Gifford, soap operas, Nine Inch Nails and everything in between and melted it all in a forge, neon lava staring back at him in his own, extraterrestrially pompadoured image.

Now David Lynch takes the long black ride down the Lost Highway. The Lost Highway is America’s great thoroughfare. Hank Williams rode it and named it. It’s just a carnival ride of mystery and darkness.

Off the road shoulder, Johnson, terrified, speaks softly with the Pig Man. Elvis is there in his black and pink suit and he’s happy he’s young again and off the pills. But Vegas is somewhere off the Highway too. Maybe looking like Hunter Thompson’s Vegas, yet there are no forced residencies. Not for Elvis. He’s at the Arcade in Memphis eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Lynch is not taking the Vegas Exit. Nor Memphis. He prefers the road and its endless night and racing yellow ticker-tape, marking the Lost Highway.

You might think this is all some myth but you’ve seen the Wolf Boy. You’ve seen the stars light up the Western Montana Fair. You’ve seen the mermaids swimming behind the bar of a dim tiki lounge in Great Falls, and you’ve seen the World’s Largest Bison and the plaster dinosaurs of South Dakota. The shapes of ghost towns and ghost motels receding in the night. The sun sets in the west but boy is it ever boiling red. You’ve seen the Carny in Chief’s weird rallies on your wild glowing screen. You’ve seen the hitchhiker from Hell.

You’ve seen the black road flowing beneath you like a snake.

1. The Review

The grotesque! It’s one of the things separating the Southern Gothic from—well, just Southern. What separates Wise Blood from Where the Crawdads Sing. Peter Farris’s The Devil Himself (Arcade Crimewise, 2022) is a crime novel. It sits in that genre class, dubbed “Southern Noir” or “Country Noir,” attended by Donald Ray Pollock, S.A. Cosby, Attica Locke and Brian Panowich, and yet Farris’s noir is heightened by the grotesque.

In the opening pages, a sex worker named Maya is bound in a trunk, escapes her captors into a dark field in rural South Georgia—at night.

The field is ghastly: “At least a dozen scarecrows haunted the pasture, threadbare robes swaying in a breeze,” the scarecrows’ “stuffed bodies hanging from X-shaped crosses and draped with twisted vine.” One scarecrow’s “head was cocked to one side, as if it were asleep on a train, mouth fashioned into a crinkled grin.”

The man who lives on this pasture, an ex-moonshining old timer named Leonard Moye, frightens and maims Maya’s pursuers with a shotgun butt. Maya and Leonard form an unlikely bond—the heart of Farris’s story. Maya awakens the next day in Leonard’s home, quickly discovering his chief eccentricity: he’s married to a mannequin. A mannequin named Marjean, after his real wife, whose fate or whereabouts are a mystery.

One might claim that a fleet of scarecrows and a mannequin wife (named Marjean) rings over-the-top or cliché. But if you’re slavering for the Southern Grotesque you’d probably rather be reading stories populated by such creatures than not. And we dispel the cliché claim via the simple reality that there aren’t many other books populated by such creatures, at least not in our era.

Flannery O’Connor had Enoch and the Gorilla, Hulga’s prosthetic leg in “Good Country People”; Lester Ballard and his fright wig in Child of God; Harry Crews had a man eating an entire car. Farris’s scarecrows and mannequins are welcome in these parts.

Without these grotesqueries, The Devil Himself is a crime novel, plain and simple. Maya is a victim of sex-trafficking, marked for death by her pimp, Lucio, a fearsome drug lord. Her major client is an Atlanta politician only referred to as The Mayor (easy to infer he’s the mayor of Atlanta). He possesses Maya’s services on exclusive. He even marks her haunch with a branding iron: the letters HH, “His Honor.”

Evidently The Mayor, in the throes of high lust, is a bit of an over-sharer. Mired in Lucio’s criminal underworld, The Mayor tells Maya too much. This happens off-camera; the novel starts terrifically in medias res—after an abstruse italicized prologue, likewise always welcome in these parts—with the opening line: “The girl in the trunk had been bound.” This is a line that sets the aesthetic tone for the rest of Farris’s book, which is told in chiseled yet evocative prose and cruises like a V12 outboard motor.

I won’t give too much away. But it’s a stone cold noir: you can guess Lucio and his goons return for Maya and Leonard. Showdowns ensue. There are creatively grim, Tarantino-style death scenes to which Joe Bob Briggs—longstanding televangelist of horror and grindhouse film criticism—would give especially high marks (Shotgun Fu! Burning Head Fu! Gator Fu!).

The novel is gritty and dark and quick, but the prose is juiced up by potent imagery, the lexicon of Place, and the requisite black humor deployed by practitioners of the grotesque. A bar called The Bee “had once been a great place to eat, a fish camp famous for shellcrackers fried in deep fat. Now the place inspired nothing but unwanted pregnancies and fistfights.”

It is hard to beat a word like shellcracker. Thus it rises above the characterless tepidity that renders much lauded American fiction boring and uninspiring: minimalism for minimalism’s sake, over-workshopped Iowa fiction, poorly edited darlings—or simply just prose lacking in personality, verve and exuberance.

It is not a perfect novel: some of Maya and Leonard’s interactions are syrupy sweet, but I hesitate to criticize such a dark work’s brief sentimental shimmers. And I think a little resistance to anti-sentimentalism is healthy in a post Carver-Lish era. Many of my creative writing workshop profs were acolytes of that movement—I recall characters crying in fiction prohibited. Which is strange, because people cry in real life all the time.

This is clearly an endorsement of Farris’s book; continuing to discuss its meat would be tiresome. If you like dark Southern fiction, order it online. I highly doubt you’ll find it in a bookstore.

And that’s what’s curious.

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2. The French

The Devil Himself was published in France prior to its American release. In France, Le diable en personne won the Le Prix 813 and was an official selection for the “prestigious” Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, which sounds pretty goddamned fancy. It was blurbed by Brian Panowich and Frank Bill and received high marks by ELLE and Rolling Stone.

Its follow-up novel, The Bone Omen, has yet to find a home in the US. Safe to say The Devil Himself was written well before its 2022 US release by Arcade—a smallish but more daring and impartial imprint, I reckon—and Farris has already had time to write (and publish, but only in France!) another book. If I do say so myself: pretty weird!

There are many reasons an indie/small/medium press would be preferable to the Big Five, especially if you aren’t delusional enough to be banking on a big advance for a novel that begins with the line “The girl in the trunk had been bound.”

Farris might be just as happy as happy can be. I don’t know the guy. He’s a Georgia writer, not far from my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I live in Western Montana now and I’ve no idea what’s going on down there, if he’s giving readings at indie bookstores in metro Atlanta, or quaint little towns like Ellijay studding the lower Appalachian foothills, the Piedmont, towns still dialed back enough to respect and welcome a Farris-type. Maybe he has an ebullient local following. He’s enjoying the good life of the outsider—at odds with the current mores of a craven, enraged mainstream literary establishment. Sounds cool as shit to me.

I don’t want to make assumptions about this author. I just think this is a thing worth examining: Farris’s new novel The Bone Omen (which I have no way of reading because I don’t know French), was blurbed (such a horrible word, like a whale’s fart) by Ron Rash—not a million unit-shifter, yet certainly an enormously successful author in contemporary Southern Letters. Rash says, “Farris is a gifted writer. He has a profound empathy for those among us who have little power, only courage and resolve. The Bone Omen deserves a wide and appreciative audience.” Note that Rash’s comment sounds a little pleading.

Maybe I’m just that naive, but I’ve always believed in nepotism. This dude Farris gets an endorsement from one of the biggest Southern writers of the last twenty years, whose novel Serena was a bestseller and spawned a Hollywood film starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence (an utter box-office and critical disaster, but still), who’s still winding up on the New Yorker’s year-end Bests lists, and Farris can’t get published in the States with any measure of ease? Is he represented by an incompetent agent? Were the editors who read the submission semi-literate? Or maybe his agent is savvy enough to know how to handle a writer like Farris: sell the goddamned book to France! For all I know—and I certainly don’t—France is funneling Farris the big bucks.

I distinctly recall reading an interview with the late author Barry Hannah, niche icon of the Southern Grotesque in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, talking about how “the French, they just love me. They devour every part.” Not a real quote, but it sounds like something Barry Hannah would say. (“Distinctly recall,” yet not distinctly enough to actually remember it.)

Makes sense to me: the French have an affinity for violent, cantankerous American fly-over fiction—more so than the American literary establishment, who would hate being called the American literary establishment. Presently, American editors at the Big Five and prestige literary journals (prestige is a bit of a stretch considering the size of their readership) would much rather read French authors than American ones. Maybe the whole thing boils down to—on both sides of the pond—fetishizing other cultures. They’re not my next door neighbors. They don’t affect laws affecting me or my loved ones. There’s no crushing cognitive dissonance. Fling open the dust jacket. Let ‘er rip.

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3. Crime is where it’s at

The Southern Grotesque shall not be mistaken for a boys club, or even a Southern club. It certainly had been at one time, but a dick is not a prerequisite to writing this kind of fiction. Writers like Amelia Gray, Jamie Quatro (Two-Step Devil), Julia Elliott and Fernanda Melchor (whose novel Hurricane Season—published in the States in 2020—reads like a witchy, irate Faulkner on Angel Dust) are writing in the grotesque mode. But even work such as theirs is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

I found out about Peter Farris through Crime Reads, a wing of Literary Hub. Much more fun than Literary Hub. I think on my fiftieth variant of Googling new dark southern gothic novels 2020s I rabbit-holed upon this post: “Y’all Means All: On the Growing Diversity of Southern Gothic and Rural Noir.” Lotta badass women here writing dark fiction. The piece mentions Wanda M. Morris, Kelly J. Ford, Jesmyn Ward (certainly!), and then Peter Farris, “arguably one of the best writers of Southern fiction [who] can’t seem to stay published in the United States.” I was instantly intrigued. Farris is “far more popular in Europe, where the strangeness that lies at the heart of so many Southern stories seems to be more accepted and even encouraged.”

Thus I found Farris, and was shocked that I’d never heard of him. But why would I have heard of him? I’ve only just recently been compelled to peer into the crime zone for anything other than what’s just straight-up and hardboiled.

But Crime’s tropes mark all manner of classic Southern fiction, particularly its gothic twin. And, given the twin’s funereal veils of aesthetic darkness, the horror genre also comes into play. Yeah, Faulkner was an acolyte of Joyce, Cormac McCarthy an acolyte of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor an acolyte of—shit, Catholic extraterrestrials? Anyway: rooted in the literary for sure (whatever that actually means). However.

Larry Brown said his first unpublished novel—dude had a lot of false starts—was about a killer grizzly bear in Yellowstone. Jayne Anne Phillips’s debut collection Black Tickets features a stripper who’s the daughter of a witch. Faulkner wrote Sanctuary, a seedy noir he claims to’ve written just to put bread on the table (it’s still dyed in his berserk, impressionistic prose, but less so). And Davis Grubb, a post-Faulkner rural gothic writer, composed The Night of the Hunter, adapted into the 1955 Charles Laughton film of the same name, immortal cinematic amber fusing German Expressionism to the American Hillbilly Thriller. For generations, fly-over American writers—some of whom are lauded as fucking geniuses—have been composing genre fiction cloaked in the bejeweled aesthetics of high art. Who knew?

Take Cormac McCarthy. One reason why he wound up so successful is that, underneath the cosmic drapery of his prose, he wrote great genre fiction. He really only wrote three straight-up literary works: The Orchard Keeper (gothic as fuck, mind you), Suttree (same), and The Passenger/Stella Maris (same-same). We can argue about those, but we can’t argue that Outer Dark and Child of God are deeply horror-adjacent (Child of God is too fastened to its ghoul’s point of view—and it’s also too funny—to be considered a pure horror novel); Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy are Westerns; No Country for Old Men is a ripping, stone cold thriller; The Road is post-apocalyptic, and also horrific.

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, one of the grandaddies of them all, is a total romp. Awash in its characters’ interiority and impressionistic, metaphysical expressions—and Faulkner’s own apparent half-lunacy—it succeeds too in its dark suspense narrative. Its central brood, the Bundrens, encounter outrageous calamity: an ill-fated attempt to ford a river, a barn burning, terrible injuries, a dead woman narrating from her coffin. Flannery O’Connor’s most famous short story (and possibly her best) “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is about a family traveling through a countryside in which a serial killer is running amok. Lotta danger here.

After reading a wealth of literary fiction in college and grad school, from the required Carver and Joy Williams to Beckett and Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison—and always my cache of Southern Rogues—I started leaning on Raymond Chandler and Dashielle Hammett and James Lee Burke, Shirley Jackson and Poe and Thomas Ligotti and even some Stephen King. Gimme danger.

But there’s always more danger in the Southern Grotesque. It’s in the blooden history and the landscape: the suffocating maw of an Appalachian forest—kudzu cascades and heaving mists, just breathing the land’s dusky textures—and the stink and murk of a South Georgia swamp; its crude characters, its lunatics, its rogues, its deranged; its survivors.

Much has been written of this already, and yet its forests and swamps and seedy strip malls and drug dens and catfish suppers have not been exhausted. Its people certainly have not.

What’s troubling about its literary disappearance is its enduring presence in the actual world, and how cowardly and censoring it is to suppress it. Many interesting things happen in New York City, but these things are fastened to a dominant cultural epicenter pumping its stories out one deckle-edged hardback after another. I’m making a gross generalization, and forgive me for not mentioning last year’s three books set in Ohio. I was just hoping you’d catch my drift.

You can look back to Night of the Hunter, which epitomizes what makes Southern Gothic literature so special. The film’s fusion of hillbilly narrative and dreamlike imagery is tantamount to the genre’s greatest achievement: the perfect marriage of the high-brow to the low. These authors write about carnies and grifters and lowlifes and the generally abandoned—and do so in striking, poetic and sometimes surrealistic prose. The old deranged bard Faulkner set quite a standard. Peter Farris is much cleaner, much terser, but the rule still applies: writers write, Southern writers howl.

4. Other Doors

I’m not connected enough within the publishing industry to make generalized claims concerning its current dealmakers, tastemakers and gatekeepers. One might throw up their hands, crying that the lack of grotesque fiction in the stratosphere of the literary is due to a literati whose cabinet is composed of utter prudes and bad readers (although there is some concern there).

It’s alarming how difficult it is for Peter Farris to find a home in his own country. Barring that (and, I’d imagine, many other instances thereof), I’d like to offer a glimmer of hope to my fellow grotesques.

A frail theory indeed (again, I am not well-connected enough to make broad claims), but it’s possible some grotesque fiction has simply been repackaged. If you look to what’s nominated for the big literary prizes you’ll be sorely bereft, still just as hungry as hell. No matter what’s actually happening in the publishing industry—whether or not the mainstream literary establishment absolutely loathes fly-over state writers and their stories, with true and vicious hatred and cunning—you will nonetheless have to make do. You’ll have to look through other doors.

Farris was dug up from a single article—on an offshoot of a literary zine much less robust than, say, The New York Review of Books. Dug up from a small crime imprint. As a searcher, I found a book that I love, in the genre I most adore, published in 2022. Like Jamie Quatro’s Two-Step Devil and Lee Clay Johnson’s Nitro Mountain—a brilliantly pulsing and intriguingly structured rural Virginia noir, seared and blackened—Farris brings the Southern Gothic into the twenty-first century with all the verve and exuberance and lyrical brilliance of yesteryear, and I have a feeling there’s more of it. And more coming. If not, we must have more indie presses, more advocates for the grotesque, more fearless editors who are hungry for words and hungry for danger and darkness. We must look at the grotesque. Peer into it. The darkness, more than ever.

Or we could all just learn French.