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In the Heart of the Beast
Everybody has a plan for a better life in Jack Rife’s In the Heart of the Beast, and nearly every plan comes with a price someone else may have to pay. Set in Texas during the Christmas season of 1976, this sprawling work of literary historical fiction follows a circle of former radicals whose drug business becomes entangled with an arms deal and revolutionary politics. A murder unsettles Austin’s underground economy, while an inheritance dispute exposes another network of money and influence. The combination gives this political thriller plenty of danger, but its strongest pull comes from watching people explain their choices to themselves. Rife is especially sharp about how easily a cherished principle can become permission to use somebody else.
The characters give those questions their weight. Michael Duval’s inherited privilege sits uneasily beside his revolutionary sympathies, and his confidence makes him both persuasive and deeply frustrating. His friend John Detleptsen brings skepticism, exhaustion, and the precarious perspective of a recovering addict to their shared enterprise. W. P. O’Duggan, a veteran with a wife and children, measures loyalty through obligations that become increasingly difficult to reconcile. Allie Beth Kauffman’s practical intelligence and complicated attachment to Michael add another kind of pressure, while Helen Jameson’s hopes for love and ordinary happiness keep the human cost in view. Their conversations can be funny, cutting, and painful within a few lines. You get to know these people through the distance between what they say they value and what their actions ask of others.
Rife’s Texas has texture you can almost feel on your clothes: damp river bottoms, cold marble, smoky dance halls, battered upholstery, and the relentless discomfort of winter travel. Austin’s changing skyline and expanding property market make the setting part of the book’s argument about wealth, belonging, and displacement. The writing moves between earthy dialogue and elaborate, image-heavy sentences, often following a character into a memory while a conversation continues around them. That layered approach gives this character-driven crime fiction considerable emotional depth. It also makes for a demanding read. Political speeches and philosophical discussions occupy substantial stretches, and repeated arguments sometimes slow the momentum. The frequent racial slurs, explicit sexual material, and graphic brutality make the atmosphere abrasive; some sweeping claims about women and men feel heavy-handed.
I think what makes In the Heart of the Beast compelling is how persistently its questions reach into private life. Arguments about capitalism, revolution, and freedom become arguments about who gets protected, who does the dangerous work, and whose dreams deserve everyone else’s sacrifice. The same scrutiny reaches family ambition, romantic attachment, and friendship, giving the novel a reach that suits its substantial length. I found it most affecting when a small gesture or an awkward exchange carried the weight of those larger concerns. Readers drawn to Texas historical fiction, morally complicated characters, and political suspense will find plenty to engage with here. It’s a thorny, ambitious novel whose strongest passages make ideology feel personal, particularly when the people speaking most confidently have the greatest difficulty seeing themselves clearly.
Pages: 819 | ASIN : B0HHR7BLKD
The Watersmith
Yance Wyatt’s The Watersmith is a Southern Gothic novel with a restless imagination and a sharp ear for the stories families tell about themselves. Set in and around Show Low, Tennessee, it follows Jack Calloway, an aspiring inventor whose drinking, marriage, and relationship with his son are tangled up in a much older family history. Jack wants to make something meaningful, but understanding the people closest to him proves a tougher assignment. Wyatt builds this literary fiction around grief, memory, and the wish to keep love within reach. The book’s strange possibilities grow from recognizably human impulses, giving its darker moments an intimacy that makes them especially unsettling.
Jack’s voice does much of the work. He’s funny, observant, defensive, and capable of revealing more about himself than he seems to realize. You can feel his affection for his wife, Jolene, and his son, JJ, even when his explanations expose the damage his pride can do. The conversations between father and son are especially convincing, full of teasing, missed signals, and small openings that either man might close without meaning to. Jolene brings practicality, wit, and desires of her own to the marriage, which gives the family drama its emotional substance. Wyatt also makes room for abrasive relatives and unexpected friendships. Their exchanges have the awkwardness of people who share plenty of history and very little practice saying what matters.
The landscape is just as closely observed. Heat, birdsong, rough timber, roadside diners, and changing currents give this Southern literary fiction a physical presence. Smell becomes a particularly effective link between memory and the present, carrying emotional associations that a straightforward recollection couldn’t quite capture. Water runs through the novel’s language and structure, gathering meaning as Jack’s understanding of his life shifts. Wyatt clearly enjoys a surprising comparison, and many of them are wonderfully precise. The prose is most affecting when a gesture, an everyday object, or a brief exchange gets enough space to carry the feeling.
What gives The Watersmith its staying power for me is the uncomfortable closeness of devotion and control. Jack’s desire to care for his family sits alongside his difficulty hearing them, and Wyatt gives that tension sustained attention. The town’s inherited divisions add another layer: family names, money, religion, and the stories preserved as local history all shape what people believe they’re entitled to. That wider perspective helps the novel’s private sorrows feel rooted in a community with its own selective memory. As Southern Gothic fiction and a literary family drama, the book offers dark humor, disturbing imagery, and considerable tenderness. I found its quieter moments of human contact especially persuasive. They give the novel’s bigger ideas weight, leaving you thinking about how love is expressed, how blame travels through families, and what it takes to listen.
Pages: 273 | ASIN : B0FPQSPYXX
A Sense of Perspective
Bathing With JFK follows a bored Houston lawyer whose youthful fascination with John F. Kennedy has left him longing for the kind of extraordinary, consequential life he imagines JFK led. What inspired the idea for this book, and where did Austin Grant first come from?
While much of the chaos captured in the book was manufactured, the bored lawyer/JFK-adoration parts were real. It is sort of where I was back then. When one is young, personal limitations that seem so self-evident in later years don’t even make a blip on the screen. Like Austin, in my 30s I was hoping for an escape of some sort, and starting Bathing With JFK seemed a potential exit route. Though, as is usually the case in life, it didn’t come to fruition until decades later, when I no longer needed an escape. Life.
The campaign in the novel is chaotic, excessive, and often ridiculous, but it also exposes how political campaigns actually operate. What aspects of political culture were you most interested in satirizing?
Primarily the difference between what a politician says in front of a camera and what they say behind it. I have known a few of them, and my advice is that if there is one you particularly look up to, avoid getting to know them.
Martin is one of the novel’s most loyal and compelling characters. What does Martin provide Austin that Austin cannot provide himself?
Martin provides Austin with a sense of perspective and a view of the future that is longer than the life of the present cocktail. I have had a friend much like Martin for over 50 years who, at appropriate junctures, has guided me and chided me. Austin’s clumsy expressions of love for his friend wrote themselves, as I’ve had many such feelings in my own life. (Although one of the inside, practical jokes of the book is that my real-life Martin was the one always meeting the girls while I stood around and for the most part watched.)
What does “living a big life” mean to you now, and has writing this novel changed your own understanding of what makes a life consequential?
Ironically, now in my 60s, living a big life means living a small one: fewer people, fewer events, fewer ambitions. As far as a consequential life, I’d go with surrounding yourself with the right people and seeing things, especially difficult things, through.
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Austin Grant has spent his life chasing the next thrill—booze, women, and just enough lunacy to keep boredom at bay. A trial lawyer with charm to spare and a lack of discipline to match, he’s never had much use for purpose—until a grudge against a powerful state senator pushes him into a race he has no business running.
What begins as revenge quickly spirals into a chaotic, no-holds-barred campaign filled with missteps, imbecility, and moments of surprising brilliance. As Austin stumbles toward something resembling conviction, he’s forced to confront the wreckage of his choices—and the people he’s hurt along the way.
Set against the sharp-edged backdrop of Texas politics, this is a story of mindless ego, casual recklessness, and perhaps second chances—where winning the race may mean losing everything that matters.
Bathing With JFK
Ken Wall’s Bathing With JFK is a sprawling political satire, legal comedy, and character-driven comic novel set in 1990s Texas. Its narrator, Austin Grant, is a bored Houston lawyer whose youthful fascination with John F. Kennedy has left him craving the kind of grand, consequential life he imagines JFK lived. Austin’s solution is to challenge entrenched state senator Buzz Laughlin, a conservative celebrity with deep pockets, a talent for spectacle, and a long memory. What follows is an unruly campaign filled with dirty tricks, disastrous appearances, false arrests, sexual complications, and enough alcohol to alarm a distillery. The book establishes Austin’s central contradiction early: he genuinely wants to live boldly and serve a purpose, but he’s spent years confusing appetite, attention, and performance with significance.
The novel is funniest when it turns campaigning into organized chaos. Austin’s team includes Martin, his brilliant and fiercely loyal lifelong friend; Sarah, the sharp-tongued strategist who rarely lets him escape his own foolishness; and Linc, whose enthusiasm produces its own memorable trouble. Their underfunded operation lurches from door-knocking humiliations to media ambushes while Buzz’s machine answers every setback with another attack, arrest, or strategically placed umbrella. Wall understands the theater of politics, particularly the gap between what candidates say, what consultants arrange, and what voters actually notice. The episodes are deliberately excessive, but they’re tied together by a perceptive idea: a campaign can reveal a person even while teaching that person how to conceal himself.
Austin’s voice drives this satirical comedy novel, and readers who enjoy shameless first-person narrators will find plenty to work with. He’s quick, observant, vulgar, self-dramatizing, and often much more perceptive about everyone else than he is about himself. His endless jokes create a breathless rhythm, though the book’s length and appetite for digression can make some comic routines feel extended beyond their strongest beat. Still, the humor gradually gains emotional weight through Austin’s relationships with Martin, Marie, and his father. Martin gives the story its warmest friendship, while Marie refuses to become a prize waiting at the end of Austin’s adventure. Her clear-eyed understanding of him keeps the romantic comedy elements grounded in consequence rather than wish fulfillment.
That consequence is what gives Bathing With JFK more staying power than its wildest scenes initially suggest. Austin enters the race hoping to become larger than life, wins through a mixture of luck, nerve, loyalty, and questionable tactics, then discovers that victory can arrive after the things that matter have already begun slipping away. The closing pages resist an easy redemption and land on a fittingly uneasy note, with Austin finally recognizing happiness and responsibility just a little too late. As a political fiction novel, legal satire, and boisterous story of male friendship and delayed adulthood, Bathing With JFK is profane, energetic, and unexpectedly melancholy. It’s ultimately about a man learning that living a big life and living a meaningful one aren’t automatically the same thing.
Pages: 479 | ASIN : B0H73MJLQS
The Origins of Lawton Passage
Lawton Passage follows a man from his childhood in small-town Tennessee through the joys and hardships of adolescence, college, and adulthood, and through grief, and back to his hometown. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In 1990 my Mom got it into her head to write her autobiography after spending a week with my Dad at a Lawrence Welk Resort out in San Diego. After many years of working through her stories, she had a partial draft readied, and declared to her four kids (with me being the youngest), “Each of you need to write your own stories.”
That’s when I began writing what I entitled “The Wavettes” which I shared with my siblings and my parents. The first one covered our strategies to get my parents to stop smoking. Another one was a collection of memories of all our pets that we lost to the highway. A third recounted my exploits in learning how to drive, and the fourth one talked about my early impressions about religion. My dad wouldn’t say whether or not he liked that one, he just said he didn’t quite know what to make of it. I felt that as a kind of disapproval that I indicated that I should be all in about religion around my Dad.
What was really nice about the Wavettes period in the development of Lawton Passage was that these were stories that my parents got to see before they passed away. The sixth and final Wavette was a kind of therapy piece for myself after being with my dad during the last week of his life. It was in that story that I recounted how my cousin told me the night before my dad’s service that his parents used to get into the biggest fights every season whenever the annual Christmas newsletter arrived. “You can’t write that!” Mom told me on the phone after she read the story.
That was the day I discovered the prominence of the annual Christmas newsletter in our family, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell any interesting truths, if they happened to be inconvenient.
Looking back, was Liam’s emotional journey always clear to you, or did it emerge gradually as you wrote?
When I began I just thought it would be Liam’s stories all told with a bit of humor. Except for the very last one (which is not in Lawton Passage), the Wavettes tended to be funny, light-hearted, and tongue-in-cheek. Once I reached the period where I would write about junior and senior high school, the tone had to deepen to stay real because tragedy began to enter the environment. I felt this keenly when my childhood friend passed away at the age of 46, but it would take another ten years before I began writing it down because these were stories that I had kept from my parents. I waited until my Dad was gone and my Mom was under the cloud of Alzheimers before setting pen to paper on that segment.
The journey further deepened in 2021 when Liam returned to Lawton to attend the funeral of his cousin during the time of Covid. So many had been lost, so it became a reflection of not only the loss of friends and family, but also the loss of home. It wasn’t really until I had written it all down, and edited the book again and again and again and … well, you get the picture … that I realized that the end of the book was all about getting closure. Closure with the bridge incident, closure with leaving home, closure with being right with Dad and closure with being right with Mom.
The Christmas newsletters provide a fascinating frame for the novel. What inspired you to use them as a storytelling device?
Most of the stories had already been written before I ever thought of using the Christmas newsletters. I realized they had a special prominence on that day when Mom had said “You can’t write that.” Then I discovered a bound set of newsletters from Dad in a stack of papers in the entertainment center in 2021. It was a couple of months before my siblings and I were scheduled to meet on my birthday at my parent’s gravesite to bury their ashes.
We’d already spent most of our sadness regarding our loss of each of them during their first services years prior. The burial of their joint ashes took on more of a tone of celebratory closure. So I found choice excerpts from Dad’s newsletters about each of us kids, and told a funny story that contrasted with the innocent image that Dad portrayed in the newsletters. I read those over their ashes so we could all share a good laugh the day they were buried. Those excerpts found their way into Chapter 51 of Lawton Passage —- “Wind-Up.”
As I began dividing up my work on Lawton Passage as individual short stories to be released as Lyle’s Weekly Reader, I thought it would be cool to put a fitting excerpt from my Dad’s newsletters to begin each of those stories that depicted a period before junior high school. For junior high school and beyond, I did not initially use excerpts from the Christmas newsletter. Instead I began those stories with excerpted stanzas from rock and roll songs which were current during that day. However, when I learned that I could run into royalties issues, I dropped that idea and used excerpts from the Christmas newsletter all the way through.
Are there more stories from Vale Hollow or Liam’s world that you hope to tell?
The initial draft of Lawton Passage ran approximately 80 pages longer with a section called “Embarkation.” I felt the inclusion of that section would make Lawton Passage too long and would push publication of the book into 2027. The story involves my final days with my dad in hospice. To extend the content to make it a fuller book, I am exploring taking material from three interviews I videotaped with my dad about his life before I was born.
Another story option I am considering would be a fantasy, which would involve time travel between the current day and 1976 in Lawton, Tennessee. It would draw on high school characters introduced in Lawton Passage and intersperse them with a modern-day cadre of armchair philosophers and a wealthy entrepreneur. Together they would travel back in time to stop the murder by a chicken farmer of his wife with a wooden coat hanger.
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Tim Duning’s Lawton Passage follows Liam, a boy raised in his ancestral country home built in the 1840s, as he adjusts to small-town rituals, and the quiet pressures of Southern life during the 1960s and ’70s. Through thefts and schoolyard hijinks, swimming pool accidents, séances, paper routes, and first loves, Liam navigates a childhood and adolescence shaped by faith, family, and friendship—always measuring the perfection his father presents against the messy realities he experiences.
From the explosive humor of sabotaged cigarettes to the tragedies of peer loss, the memoir captures the grit, grief, and laughter of growing up in a town that refuses to stay small. Forty years later, Liam returns to Lawton, tracing the echoes of his past, realizing that home and family live most vividly in stories, not land. Lawton Passage is a poignant, funny, and deeply honest meditation on legacy, memory, and the Southern art of storytelling.
Lawton Passage
In Lawton Passage: As Told by a Tennessee Storyteller, author Tim Duning follows Liam Menschen from his childhood at Vale Hollow in small-town Tennessee through adolescence, college, adulthood, grief, and return. Framed by his father’s polished Christmas newsletters, the book becomes a memoir about family mythology, Southern manners, church, friendship, mischief, race, class, memory, and the strange ache of outliving the world that made you.
I found the book most alive when it lets childhood look at adult life from under the table. The cigarette smoke, cocktail parties, school bus rides, church pews, Kroger gum, and family performances all carry a comic charge, but Duning is not merely being nostalgic. He has a fine eye for the absurd choreography of respectability: the way a family can cultivate manners while quietly avoiding certain truths, the way a Christmas letter can be both love song and scorecard, the way a child can understand more than adults think and less than he imagines.
What stayed with me was the book’s gradual deepening. Early chapters have the bright, anecdotal snap of porch storytelling, but later sections gather a more elegiac gravity. Duning writes about parents, old friends, hometown rituals, and return without embalming them. His tone can be funny, rueful, tender, and sly within the same scene. At times, the abundance of episodes gives the book a meandering, oral-history feel, but that looseness is also part of its charm; it reads like someone pulling chairs closer as the night gets longer.
This book will appeal to readers of Southern memoir, coming-of-age story, family history, small-town Americana, and nostalgic literary nonfiction. Readers who enjoy Rick Bragg’s work, especially his blend of humor, family devotion, and regional memory, will find a familiar warmth here, though Duning’s voice is more shaggy, conversational, and quietly self-interrogating. Lawton Passage is a loving inventory of a vanished place, told by someone wise enough to know that home is never as simple as memory makes it.
Pages: 354 | ASIN : B0H3WV4RQ4
Tales From the Texas Timberlands, Volume 2
Tales from the Texas Timberlands Volume 2, by J. Andrew Rice, is a fiction anthology rooted in East Texas life, family memory, faith, work, and community. Across five stories, Rice moves from a postwar sawmill and a woman’s unexpected wrestling career to city management, football coaching, and church ministry. The book has the feel of stories passed down on a porch, where personal history, local color, and moral reflection all sit side by side.
What stood out to me most was the book’s steady affection for ordinary people doing hard things. Rice writes with a clear respect for builders, teachers, coaches, public servants, church members, and family elders. The stories are often direct, sometimes almost plainspoken, but that plainness works with the material. It gives the book an unvarnished quality. I felt like I was listening to someone who knows these towns, these arguments, these little rituals, and these long memories. The writing doesn’t rush to impress. It takes its time.
I also appreciated the way Rice lets each story carry a lesson without making the whole book feel like a lecture. That balance isn’t always easy. At times, the themes are stated openly, especially around faith, leadership, character, and perseverance, but the best moments come when those ideas rise naturally from the characters’ choices. Mattie’s strength in “Red Hammer Body Slammer,” Guy’s principles in “Sawmill,” Kent’s public service in “The City Manager,” Gary’s mentorship in “Coach,” and the narrator’s church life in “When We All Get To Heaven” all point toward the same belief: people are shaped by work, place, faith, and the stories they inherit. That idea really resonated with me.
As Southern historical fiction and a regional short story collection, Tales from the Texas Timberlands Volume 2 will appeal most to readers who enjoy character-driven stories with a strong sense of place. I would recommend it to anyone who likes reflective small-town fiction, family-centered storytelling, faith-inflected narratives, and books that treat local history as something alive rather than dusty. It’s warm, sincere, and grounded. Readers who enjoy stories about legacy, grit, and community will find a lot to appreciate here.
Pages: 171 | ASIN : B0H2DKDV3Y
Listed
Listed imagines a Louisiana where children can be entered into a market before they are born, their futures priced, traded, and later harvested through dividend claims on their adult earnings. The novel follows Solomon and Leah, two listed children whose lives are shaped by share prices, compliance reports, family sacrifice, and the strange intimacy of being loved through a system that also exploits them. Told through the voice of Eve, their daughter, the story becomes more than a critique of financialized childhood; it is a generational reckoning with the compromises parents make when the world turns love into math.
Leger doesn’t lean on spectacle, even though the premise could easily support it. Instead, he builds the horror through kitchen tables, cold coffee, school records, pay stubs, and the small humiliations of being assessed. Solomon’s childhood feels polished into performance, while Leah’s feels like a long act of refusal against a number that never understood her. I found the contrast between investor language and parental memory especially sharp: the market sees milestones, but the families remember cake, red beans, fly balls, illness, silence, and the ache behind every “opportunity.”
I also admired the novel’s patience. It resists turning any parent into a simple villain, which makes the book more troubling and more humane. Gerald, Pete, Valerie, Carolyn, Solomon, and Leah all participate in the system in different ways, but the novel keeps asking whether participation is the same as consent when the alternative is scarcity. That moral ambiguity gives the story its bite. The final part, when the promise not to list a child begins to buckle under the pressure of real expenses and inherited logic, felt inevitable in the saddest possible way. The book understands that systems endure not because people fail to love their children, but because love itself can be conscripted.
Readers who enjoy dystopian family drama, science fiction, social satire, and morally complex near-future novels will find Listed especially compelling. It would appeal to book clubs and readers drawn to stories about class, parenting, capitalism, medical and educational ambition, and the cost of being measured too early. In spirit, it sits near Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, not because the plots are alike, but because both novels turn an institutional cruelty into something intimate, tender, and almost unbearable. Listed is a haunting novel about the price of a child, and the immeasurable worth the market can never touch.
Pages: 149 | ASIN : B0GWV76KGL
