BACK TO THE DIRT

Grim, violent, and chock-full of mayhem and despair—welcome back to Frank Bill country.

Miles Knox is an aging Vietnam vet, well-meaning but prone to steroid-fueled rage—and tortured still by what he saw and did in country. Shelby McCutchen is his much-younger girlfriend, a stripper forced to take care of the fragile and damaged men in her family: her painkiller-addicted twin, Wylie, and her drunk and deeply unpleasant father. When Wylie is sought for the coldblooded double murders of his oxy dealers—sought by the slow and irrelevant forces of the law but also, more dangerously, by Nathaniel, the resourceful ex-cop whose brother was one of the victims—he holes up at Miles’ rural fishing camp, with Shelby as a kind of hostage. Meanwhile Miles (when he’s not distracted by brutal fistfights, flashbacks, job worries, and even an industrial accident) begins in a haphazard way to search for her...and he and Nathaniel eventually join forces, though at this point (it’s a long story) Miles, having suddenly been introduced to LSD, is inhabiting a hallucinatory world that's equal parts southern Indiana now and southern Vietnam then. The book is not so much gritty as relentlessly grim—at its bleakest it seems a kind of ruin porn focused not on bombed-out buildings but on bombed-out people—but it does move quickly, with plenty of surprises, and it provides the all-hell-broke-loose tumult one expects from Bill. Reading it is like mainlining testosterone and hopelessness...and whether or not that seems like a compliment to you will give a good sense of whether you’re the intended audience.

All ain’t well in the heartland.