F0NO25 // Joshua Marie Wilkinson – Trouble Finds You (print; book)
$18.95
Release Date: September 12, 2023
Description
To say Harry Stables’s life has hit a bit of a low patch lately is an understatement. In his mid-20s, he’s been kicked out of his MFA program for fighting, his ex-girlfriend turned down his spur-of-the-moment marriage proposal, and he’s spent the last ten days in his dad’s falling-down Montana fishing cabin with his dog Greta trying to find out how his mother really died when he was a baby, something his father – now dying himself of cancer – has refused to tell either him or his sister their whole lives. On top of all this, he’s just been to a party outside Missoula where he received a nasty dog bite and where he may have been an accessory to a fatal shooting. Ignoring the advice of both his sister and Calvin Hogan – fishing guide, old friend of his father’s, and companion to the lovable mutt Herkimer – Harry first tries to untangle the details of the shooting himself and eventually winds up on the lam, pursued by persecutors both real and imagined. As the cops and the accumulated psychic weight of his actions bears down on him, Harry must ultimately reckon with what sort of man he will be.
According to George Saunders, “literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form” and so it is with Trouble Finds You, a modern-day Portis-like quixotic road trip replete with stumbling beauty and searing folly. Set against the beauty of the American West, this is a novel of many colors: a thriller, a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a family drama. It is populated with characters – these men and their excellent dogs – who are sometimes frustrating, frequently stupid, often funny, but always full of life. Harry Stables bears more than a passing resemblance to the Coen brothers’ Llewyn Davis, a lovable curmudgeon committed to a quest of his own design.
348 pages. E-book available here.
About the Author
Born and raised in Seattle, Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of several collections of poetry, including Selenography, Swamp Isthmus, Meadow Slasher, and Bad Woods, which is due out next year from Sidebrow Books. His work has appeared in Pen America, Tin House, The Believer, The Iowa Review, Poetry, and in many anthologies. With Solan Jensen, he directed a tour film about the band Califone, and with the late Noah Eli Gordon he co-wrote Figures for a Darkroom Voice. Wilkinson lives in the Pacific Northwest with the writer Lisa Wells and their son. After many years as a creative writing professor, he retrained as a psychotherapist. Trouble Finds You is his first novel.
Praise
Sometimes you look left or right and the world just plows into you, takes you down. Trouble Finds You does the same–and doesn’t let up.
–James Sallis
Now that Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Trouble Finds You has found you, go ahead and buckle up and in. And trust me on this. You are bound for images that’ll shake you like a saltshaker and this American yarn has undertow to it–and cinematic dialogue that crackles like a campfire.
–Abraham Smith
Press
Track List
Just before escaping the party, Harry had rolled down the driver’s side window, stuck his head out, and started to ease back as if to push people out of the way until he got his pickup pointed the right direction.
Those who hadn’t scrambled back into the house or disappeared into the high grass where the shooting started were running through the front yard. The white dog was barking at him as everybody scrambled into their vehicles, and for a moment Harry thought the animal might try to leap into the truck.
Two women appeared in his headlights, crossing in front of the truck, the sisters he’d seen earlier at the fire pit. The bigger one was sobbing, muttering something. The prettier one with short hair was stone mute with a brownish stain of blood on her dress, smeared down the length of her arm.
There was more yelling behind him from a scuffle of panicked bodies when he felt the unmistakable pressure of the truck’s back end dipping down, pressed now with some load. He turned to shout at the white dog to get out, his mouth burning with beer and tobacco. But it was not the dog.
It was two men flattening themselves down into the bed of his pickup. He leaned out the window and screamed at them to get out.
“Go, motherfucker, go!” one said as he pressed himself down out of view.
Harry swallowed a gob of spit and tore out of the yard, following the beams of his headlights back to the county road. Dirt and rocks sprayed up behind him as he drove out the way he’d come in, Kristin’s birthday flowers replaced by the shell of their plastic wrapping on the empty seat beside him.
Harry’s heart was thudding like a trapped moth. He watched the high beams light up the road before him as the truck picked up speed and rattled along the empty lane. Something smelled of dogshit, and he glanced down to see that he’d stepped in a fresh one on his sprint back through the grass. He had no clue who was riding back there, but he was helping them escape the party’s mayhem. Harry might have done the same thing had his own friends left him for dead. He’d drive down the road a ways. Pull over and figure out what to do. Maybe they’d know what the fuck happened back there.
There was a hard tap on the glass of the truck’s cab. Harry turned just enough to see that it was the nose of a rifle. Whatever momentary calm he’d felt vanished as his blood went to ice in his fingers. The rifle gave two more hard raps on the window, and Harry took a deep breath as he unlatched the black handle. He was driving sixty, then sixty-five, then nearly seventy. Without taking his eyes off the road, he slid open the window. And then the rifle slid its long barrel into the cab of his truck, like something with a brain of its own. One of the men said something Harry couldn’t make out, and the rifle nosed his shoulder.
With one hand on the steering wheel, Harry reached his left arm across his chest and wrapped it around the barrel, grabbed hold, and yanked. The force on the other end jerked it back and Harry lost his grip—his hand too sweaty to grasp the slick gunmetal. He stomped on the brake. The two men fell forward, ramming into the back of the truck’s cab, and the rifle came free, its nose spearing into the empty cup holder at Harry’s knee, and a cloud of dust was kicked up on the road and came over them like smoke.