King of Dogs

As a Soviet-style economic and social collapse tears America apart, Grayson, equal parts philosopher and warrior, but legitimately neither, makes a death-bed promise to watch over a couple with a child on the way. In his determination to make good his promise, Grayson runs headlong not only into the nexus of the hostile elite takeover, its third- country mercenaries and hunter/killer teams, but also into the subterranean realms of child, organ, and drug trafficking in which the conspirators and mercenaries operate. Driven forward by his own prior losses, Grayson must measure himself against the most austere philosophical ideals, create or discover them anew, and allow for the psychic consequences. Upon the backdrop of the hallucinatory yet beautiful, southern Utah desert, King of Dogs explores the ancient codes of honor and loyalty and delivers a powerful commentary on man's approach to God, social atomization, and surviving the collapse of a civilization. Balancing elements of the apocalyptic, epic, western and crime subgenres with more ambitious, literary sentence-to-sentence writing and substructure, King of Dogs will appeal to readers who enjoy the aesthetics of Cormac McCarthy, as well as those who appreciate the challenge and reward found in writers as diverse as Joseph Conrad, Charles Bowden, and Paul Harding.