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.
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 Alex Perez, 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.”
This was a beautifully written, encouraging and informative post. I wish you didn’t feel such a need to telegraph “this is not right wing“ though it’s understandable why you do given as you say, the “current cultural climate“ among other things. It’s sad that people consider anything heterodox as right wing, but it’s also sad that people think of anything to the right as inherently pernicious. But that’s a nitpick.
For my own part, I’m looking forward to this kind of wild West resurgence that you’re writing about and hope there’s some room for an updated suburban fiction as well. I’d be happy to see a 21st century John Cheever.
Great post!
I went looking for a review (any review, a blurb even) of Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline, in America’s prestigious lit mags and newspapers, and—Surprise! There are none. Yet this, on Substack, surpasses anything I would’ve likely discovered in the pages of NYRB or elsewhere. For anyone who loves reading and hasn’t heard of Panamerica: I suspect you will. For anyone who wants to make an honest buck rebuilding tactile culture: I am dying to smudge my fingertips with reviews like this in print.