Dixiana: 1

When cuckolded fruitshake millionaire Roy Earl Pettus inherits his grandfathers fabled honkytonk The Dixiana he hurtles into full-prodigal-son mode: once the Bossman arrives back home in Edgewater County South Carolina hes set to fix all thats wrong with his hometown and its citizens. Whether they want his leadership however is another matter. Roys hippy-dippy cousin Button Sykes on a higher consciousness trip fraught with the urge to serve and with a little added magicking spellcraft and telepathy to goose matters along seems the only one able to stave off the full destructive power of Roys tremendous wounded ego. He fancies himself a fixer but guess whos the one most in need of spiritual repair? If only Button werent so preoccupied with her own broken heart shed give Roys problems more of her attention. Through the eyes of a dozen major characters we track the progress not only of Roys existential journey and Buttons quest to reconnect with her lost love Heather but examine a few risky sexual affairs among the powerful; controversial and divisive political machinations; conflict over a Confederate monument both reviled and revered; Southern-fried organized crime figures who dont take well to Roys fresh ideas; the disposal of a dead body or two; and even a pyromaniac of a ghost who occasionally burns down the town. A finalist for the 2015 Faulkner-Wisdom Literary Competition award the Dixiana series represents a Neo-Southern Gothic great American novel for the mid-to-late 2010s one filled with humor tragedy appeals to a higher power and a troubled character crashing a plane into a building. Dixiana holds its many characters in states teetering on the edge of either grace or ruin and by the end readers may not believe how far the story takes them--all the way to one possible other side of reality.