Indiahoma: Stories of Blues and Blessings

Like a postmodern down and dirty Winesburg, Ohio, this book unravels the twisted knotty lives of the woeful and wondrous inhabitants of Indiahoma, Oklahoma, a small town "halfway between gone and went." In the first of ten stories, "Ifs and Buts, Candy and Nuts," the reader meets Lucas Moody, the former town mayor and Korean War veteran in his sixties, who, faced with his own mortality and a solitary Christmas with a faithless wife gone partying on a Caribbean beach and no family around him, sees no reason to "rage against the dying of the light," as Dylan Thomas urged of his father. The tale follows Lucas down a rutted country backroad to a  house in the middle of nowhere, a house, as he discovers of tragedy and miracle, where he is forced to abandon his self-pity and marital troubles in a frantic attempt to save a dying family.