Here’s the deal, in case you’re out of the loop: I got tagged on The FaceBook by Jimmy Callaway, himself a big thing. Rule is, I’ve got to write about what I’ve got going on. I’m duty-bound to talk up the projects I wedge in between work hours, sweating the rent and trying to balance football season with maintaining my classic svelte figure. It’s expected that I threaten you with some literary A-bomb about to go off right in your grill.

Okay. Let’s have at it.

1. What’s the working title of your current or next project? Sick House

2. Where did the idea come from? My girlfriend lived in a house with toxic mold – a “sick house” – on an untenable mortgage managed by backbiting, lawbreaking lenders, in a town ruled by the Tea Party and run on a covert dope trade. Tens of millions of others do too. This writes itself.

3. What genre does your book fall under? Thriller. Possibly Young Adult Thriller, given that the principal narrator is a sixteen-year-old girl.

4. Which actors would you choose to play the parts of your characters in a movie rendition?

Brie, our wallflower heroine, Elizabeth Olsen. Don, the overburdened dad, Michael Shannon. Rose, his haywire wife, Deborah Kara Unger. Noah, their misfit son, Nathan Kress, provided he starved himself like Bale did for The Machinist. Isaac, the baby son, some pair of babies.

5. What is the slick, one-sentence synopsis of your book? A desperate family moves to small town, USA, to start anew, only to be imprisoned by crushing debt, crazed politics, crooked townies and a house that holds a monstrous, maddening disease, turning these extreme pressures into an explosion.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? I’m represented by Stacia Decker of DMLA. She’ll turn my straw into gold.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft? I’m halfway through, thanks to a 6-week break. I aim to be done come February.

8. Which other books would you compare this to in your genre? The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon Williams. Or so I would assume; I’ve only seen the film adaptation, Straw Dogs. Also, possibly, We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

9.  Who or what inspired you to write this book? My experiences with my girlfriend and my constant saturation with America’s cultural woes. Thanks, social media monitoring day job.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interests? Besides an excruciating study of the failure of the American system? Well, it has glossolalia, Mean Girls, recipes for bombs, electrocution and social media slut-shaming. If that still doesn’t light your wick, you can skim it as a solid resource for learning air-conditioning installment and repair.

For next week, I’m tagging:

Eddy Rathke

Chris La Tray

William Dylan Powell

This week, I review three books that left a profound impression on me – The Big Three – this past month. I devoured them and found them too nourishing not to share. Dig in.

To close it out, The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock.

Small towns tend to breed big problems.

In my experience, no other active author captures the breadth and abysmal depth of this better than Donald Ray Pollock. The Devil All the Time is a grand narrative woven from sinews of wickedness from all stripe:

The pettiness. The psychosis. The craven desperation. These themes thrive in small town crime fiction because they’re fostered by the qualities of small town life. They can live in urban fiction, but cities are typified by their gloss and industry. Small towns are defined by their grit and isolation.

Each of Pollock’s characters is a vehicle for a distinct breed of madness. He includes the little tyrant in the form of the county Sheriff. Another character, lacking in means and hope in this world, tries to win assistance from the next world through crazed ritual. Yet another finds their pursuit of fame perverted into journeys of masturbatory murder.

The only lovely thing in The Devil All the Time is the writing. Pollock concentrates on menace over gore, focuses on the little treasures that give a life value and never paints in black and white. His characters are often vile, but their vileness is not broadly drawn. It is not unprecedented. And even though it is portrayed without apology or judgment, it is never done up ugly either.

This is just about the prettiest record of atrocity being printed today.

Dorothy Allison, of Bastard Out of Carolina and Trash comes to mind as Pollock’s closest literary cousin. Both treat their subjects with fascinating nuance and unflinching candor. Pollock excels at scope where Allison brings an agonizing personal depth. The Devil All the Time sets its diverse characters’ stories sailing from points all around small town experience, leading them along a grim journey until the soul-shaking climax.

It has it all: The enthralling descriptions and reflection. The corruption brewed to a boil by isolation. The expert crafting of divergent paths into a single course through the worst reaches of the heartland.

All it needs is your interest. And believe me, The Devil All the Time is worth it.

This week, I review three books that left a profound impression on me – The Big Three – this past month. I devoured them and found them too nourishing not to share. Dig in.

Today, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran.

If you know me through my writing—or know me well at all—you know I love New Orleans. I expected that I would love Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead for much that reason.

What I didn’t expect was to fall even more in love. I had to, though. Sara Gran has done more than write a damn good book about a damn great city. She crafted a love letter that showed New Orleans’ soul in all its resplendent romance.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead illuminates New Orleans’ soul by revealing the essence of it — mystery and wonder.

It arranges this premise like a line of Tarot on a table: New Orleans is beauty and tragedy and wonder incarnate. New Orleans is, therefore, a mystery. And life is beauty, tragedy and wonder. And so life is a mystery. And so New Orleans is life.

This chain of meaning evokes the power of all mysticism: When the significance we find in the symbols around us are joined together — like a causality in a mystery — a greater significance is revealed.

And no doubt, as Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead states explicitly, I knew the solution to this mystery all along. After all, Funk fan, I write about New Orleans because I find it to be a pure microcosm of the human experience. I came to my conclusion about the greater meaning of Sara Gran’s book even before I opened its splendidly symbolic minimalist cover.

It makes it no less true. Here’s my proof:

In Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, Sara composes as complete a picture of New Orleans and its inhabitants as I’ve ever seen. The majesty is there, right next to the tawdriness. The brutality is paired with heartbreaking human beauty. Sara is conscientious about arranging a total view of the spiritual spectrum.

Don’t think this is orderly, though. Oh no. Like New Orleans — like life — it is a mess. There is a fabric of meaning to it, and it all ties together, but until the twists and turns of this symphonic plot sing to a close, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is spectacular madness. Everything is a mystery.

Did it keep me baffled until the end? No. But it’s not meant to. It wants the reader invested in their own intuition. It wants you to figure it out without truly figuring it out. It’s not about being a shocking who-done-it so much as it is revealing to the reader that our powers of deduction are mighty and precious and core to who we are.

So while it didn’t have me duped as to who done it, it had me deeply invested in the question of “why.”

Why did they do it? Why do any of these characters do what they do? Why is New Orleans the way it is?

It is as much about the why in oneself as it is about why of a crime, a city, a story.

And this is a message that’s dear to me. Just as New Orleans is dear to me. There is no better city for this story: A strange, little space filled with masks and ghosts and gang wars, majestically attired and threadbare, sad and celebratory and desperately proud.

If those qualities sound familiar, they should. They’re the cityscape of most people’s souls.

I love people because of these things. I love New Orleans because that’s place where they dance and fight without shame.

I loved Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead for getting that—for reminding me why.