Nora Callahan’s gifting has kept her alive more than once—it’s how she knows, long before neighbor ranching families will admit it, that war is coming to the valley and she can’t stop it.
BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman
POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman
BUY The Rim Country: Book One “The Invitation” by W. Tod Newman.
Most Arizonans know the name Tombstone. The O.K. Corral. Wyatt Earp. The gunfight that lasted thirty seconds and generated movies and a hundred years of mythology.
Fewer know about Pleasant Valley. It is the War they forgot to put in the history books. Why? Because the town that survived—which even changed its name to make a break from the shame—refused to discuss what happened until forty years later.
In the summer of 1887, a feud erupted in the Tonto Basin between two ranching families—the Tewksburys and the Grahams—that would kill somewhere between thirty and fifty men over the next five years, wipe out the male lines of both families, and leave a valley so saturated with violence that the survivors renamed it just to escape the memory. By body count, the Pleasant Valley War was the deadliest range conflict in the history of the American West. It makes the O.K. Corral look like a disagreement over a fence line.
And almost nobody outside Arizona has heard of it. And few inside Arizona, to be honest.
I’ve been researching this conflict for the better part of a year, and the more I dig, the more convinced I am that the Pleasant Valley War is one of the great untold stories of American history. Not because of the violence—though the violence is extraordinary—but because of what the violence reveals. This wasn’t a simple feud between bad men. It was a collision of cattle and sheep interests, racial prejudice against the half-Native American Tewksbury family, the corrupting influence of a territorial cattle baron with political aspirations named James Stinson, the arrival of hired killers like Tom Horn, and the fundamental question of who had the right to determine what an ideal ranching valley was for.
Why I’m writing about it as fiction
When I first encountered the Pleasant Valley War, my instinct was to research the history for a possible historical fiction novel. But the historical record has a gap at its center that no amount of research can fill: the inner lives of the people involved. We know what happened from a few differing perspectives. We don’t know what it felt like to watch it happen from inside the valley, day by day, before anyone knew how it would end. That feels useful to me. Is this the sort of pressure between opposing sides we’re feeling today—and are we equally unsure of the outcome?
As someone who loves filling in these human gaps of history, I revel in the knowledge that this is where beautiful fiction lives.
The Rim Country is my attempt to inhabit that gap. The novel follows Nora Callahan, a widowed Irish immigrant who settles in Pleasant Valley in 1882—five years before the killing starts—and finds herself positioned between the two families as their friendship slowly becomes something else. Nora has an unusual gift: a barometric sensitivity to the intentions of the people around her, a kind of reading weather that gives her early warning of what’s coming and no way to stop it.
She is fictional. Everything around her is as historically accurate as I can make it.
The Mogollon Rim, which forms the northern boundary of Pleasant Valley and rises 2,000 feet above the Tonto Basin floor, is the novel’s central symbol—a wall between worlds, between the valley’s closed world and the open country above, between what the valley was and what it was becoming. I’ve driven that rim. I’ve stood at the edge and looked down into the basin and understood, in a way that no map communicates, why the people who settled there felt both protected and trapped.
That feeling is what I’m trying to put on the page.
Why Wattpad?
I’m publishing The Rim Country serially on Wattpad, which means you can read it chapter by chapter, free, as it develops. Book One of this series was completed on Wattpad and now is available for purchase at the link below. Now Book Two is in work on Wattpad.
Serial publication is how Dickens published. It’s how most of the great Victorian novels reached their audiences — chapter by chapter, with readers waiting to find out what happened next. There’s something fitting about telling a story of this era the way stories were told in that era.
If you’re interested in Arizona history, the Pleasant Valley War, or simply in fiction that takes its geography seriously, I’d invite you to start at the beginning. Chapter One is short. The mule is opinionated. The valley is beautiful.
It won’t stay that way.
Tod Newman writes historical fiction under the Desdichado Books imprint. He reviews books at todnewman.com and posts about the writing life, Arizona history, and whatever the Mogollon Rim is doing today.
“The woods lay silent, a black mouth swallowing sound. Pines stood jagged and skeletal against a sky bruised with dusk, their branches reaching upward as though clawing for the last veins of light. Spanish moss hung in long, gray shrouds that swayed in the still air, heavy with damp. Drops fell slow to the earth, each bead glinting like a tear suspended in its fall before breaking the mud with a soft patter.”
— Miller, Dakota. The Curses We Keep (p. 6)
So begins Dakota Miller’s debut novel, The Curses We Keep. Billed as Southern Gothic horror, I wasn’t sure what to expect — the label carries weight it rarely earns anymore. The cover art alone signals something unusual: a seriousness of intent largely absent from contemporary fiction. The artistic edge of Southern Gothic seemed to have died with Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, only partly revived by Michael McDowell and Cormac McCarthy before a distracted reading public and a risk-averse publishing industry pushed the genre toward the margins — into the hands of independent writers like Dakota Miller.
To invoke Faulkner is not to make a casual comparison, and I don’t make it casually here. Miller’s trans-generational arc — tracing one family’s curse from the Salem trials to the Low Country of South Carolina — carries unmistakable echoes of Absalom, Absalom!, in which Faulkner builds Thomas Sutpen’s dynasty from raw ambition and moral rot into something that must, by its nature, destroy itself. Faulkner wrote: “There is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know.” That sense of inevitability — of blood and sin running in channels that no act of will can redirect — is precisely what Miller achieves in tracing his family’s line forward from Salem. The curse is not supernatural decoration; it is consequence, as natural and relentless as water finding low ground.
The formal resemblance to The Sound and the Fury is equally real. Faulkner’s great novel fractures time and consciousness deliberately, forcing the reader to assemble meaning from fragments — Benjy’s disordered perception, Quentin’s obsessive circling, Jason’s bitter clarity — because the Compson family’s dissolution cannot be understood from a single, stable vantage point. Miller employs a comparable stream of consciousness to collapse distance between reader and character. We are pulled into the current rather than observing it from shore. Faulkner described his own method as rendering “the agony and the sweat” of human effort — not explaining it, but inhabiting it — and Miller clearly understands that ambition. His prose does not summarize suffering; it enacts it.
Where Faulkner’s Southern Gothic tends toward the epic and the elegiac, Flannery O’Connor’s is surgical and merciless — and Miller shares that quality too. O’Connor famously wrote that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Her grotesque characters are not freakish for shock’s sake but because, in her theological view, grace requires violence to break through human self-satisfaction. The darkness in Miller’s family saga operates similarly: the horror is not gratuitous, it is diagnostic. Every terrible thing that happens reveals something already spiritually wrong. O’Connor also said that “the meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it” — and The Curses We Keep has exactly that quality of resonance. The novel’s images and devices linger and accumulate meaning long after you’ve closed the book.
Both O’Connor and Miller share a refusal of sentimentality that is rarer than it ought to be. O’Connor once noted that “tenderness leads to the gas chamber” — by which she meant that cheap compassion, unmoored from truth, enables the worst outcomes. Miller holds to that same discipline: no character in The Curses We Keep is granted an easy exit, no suffering is cleansed into something bearable. The reader must look at what Miller is showing. That is an O’Connor demand as much as a Miller one.
Miller uses language the way the best writers do: to reflect meaning already embedded in the world rather than to manufacture his own. His prose is effective precisely because it is purposeful, laying bare the layered pain of his story without sentimentality or escape hatches. The terrible things unfolding feel like truth, and Miller refuses to soften their consequences. Every character must reckon with how their own darkness and folly have led them here — no one is spared, and no one is probably entirely innocent.
At times the writing evokes Poe in its atmospheric density; at others, the Faulknerian stream of consciousness pulls the reader into the current alongside the characters. The O’Connor edge keeps it honest and unsentimental. The effect is quietly devastating — the kind of novel that leaves you thoughtful and unsettled long after you’ve set it down.
That an independent author is doing this kind of work, largely outside the machinery of traditional publishing, is itself worth noting. The mainstream press rarely tolerates this much darkness without demanding that it be made palatable. Miller has not made it palatable. He has made it true. That distinction matters enormously, and it puts him in better company than most publishers would have the courage to print.
MORE BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman
POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman
If you liked this review, you might LOVE the Many Novels authored by W. Tod Newman.
Here’s an article I decided to write after YET ANOTHER YEAR of seeing my beloved NFL draft executed in a sub-optimal way. I’ve enjoyed seeing Dr. Richard Thaler (author of “Nudge” and winner of the Nobel prize in Economics) weighing in on this strange market and felt like this might be the time to put something in the blog explaining the issue…
Every spring, NFL front offices gather in war rooms and make decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars based, at least in part, on a laminated chart that Jimmy Johnson reportedly sketched on a cocktail napkin. That chart — formally known as the Draft Value Chart — has governed how teams trade picks for over three decades. It is also, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler, badly wrong.
Understanding how it’s wrong, and why teams keep using it anyway, is one of the more fascinating stories at the intersection of behavioral economics and professional sports. And of course, this is an area I have enjoyed writing about for years.
The Jimmy Johnson Chart: How It Works
When Jimmy Johnson became head coach of the Dallas Cowboys in 1989, he inherited a franchise in chaos. One of his early challenges was figuring out how to value picks when trading up or down in the draft. This makes great sense, because Johnson realized that there was a missing pricing mechanism.
The chart he developed assigned a point value to every pick in the seven-round draft, with the first overall pick valued at 3,000 points, the second at 2,600, and so on, declining steeply through the first round before flattening out through the later rounds.
The chart’s appeal is its simplicity. When a GM wants to trade the 4th pick (1,800 points) for the 12th pick (1,200 points) plus a second-rounder (400 points), the math is clean: 1,800 for 1,600 — close enough to shake hands. It gives both sides a common language and a face-saving mechanism for complex negotiations. (Note the “face-saving” aspect… this is where behavioral econ comes in!)
The chart spread rapidly through the league, and for decades it was essentially the industry standard. Some teams developed proprietary variants, but the underlying logic — a steep exponential curve weighted heavily toward early picks — remained the dominant framework.
What Richard Thaler Found
In 2005, economist Richard Thaler (later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017 for his work in behavioral economics) co-authored a paper with one of my favorite sports analytics gurus, Dr. Cade Massey, titled “The Loser’s Curse: Decision Making & Market Efficiency in the NFL Draft.” The findings were seriously actionable (but the NFL did not, actually, take action).
Thaler and Massey did what the Jimmy Johnson chart never attempted: they measured the actual performance of drafted players relative to their draft position and their compensation. By tracking performance metrics and rookie salary costs over many years, they constructed what amounts to a surplus value chart. In plain English, this means not just asking “how good is this player likely to be?” but “how good is this player likely to be relative to what we’re paying him?” An important distinction!
The results revealed a profound market inefficiency. Early first-round picks are dramatically overvalued by the Johnson chart relative to the surplus value they actually produce. The reason is twofold:
First, top picks are simply harder to predict. The gap in projected talent between pick #1 and pick #10 is rarely as large as teams assume, but the difference in compensation is enormous. Rookie contracts are slotted to draft position, so the first pick commands a far larger salary than the tenth — a cost premium that often exceeds the actual performance premium.
Second, the certainty bias (a cognitive bias where people value a smaller, SURE gain over a higher-risk, greater-reward opportunity) runs deep. Teams systematically overweight the “sure thing” at the top of the board, even when the historical data shows those players bust at surprising rates. Thaler identified this as a classic behavioral economics failure — the same overconfidence and loss aversion that distort decisions in financial markets showing up in draft rooms.
The Thaler/Massey surplus value model suggested that picks in the late first round and the second round offer the best value in the NFL draft — the sweet spot where players are talented enough to contribute meaningfully but cheap enough that their rookie contracts represent genuine organizational leverage. I feel like this is what I have observed over the years as well. Many more high first round picks are busts than we tend to recall.
The Arbitrage Opportunity
The part that interests me is how a team should respond to this erroneous pricing.
In the “real world” when a pricing mechanism is wrong in a systematic and predictable direction, it creates arbitrage opportunities for anyone willing to exploit the gap between perceived value and actual value. Some notable billionaires have made their fortune off of arbitrage in currency markets (this is why George Soros is known as the ‘Man who Broke the Bank of England’).
In draft terms, the arbitrage looks like this: if the Johnson chart says Pick #5 is worth Pick #18 plus Pick #52, but Thaler’s surplus value analysis says Pick #18 and Pick #52 together are actually more valuable than Pick #5, then the team trading down from #5 is winning the deal — even though the Johnson chart says it’s a roughly fair exchange.
Teams that internalize this insight should, in theory, be eager to trade down from premium picks. They receive more total surplus value while the team trading up feels satisfied because the Johnson chart validates the exchange from their perspective.
Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots were widely cited as the most aggressive exploiters of this arbitrage over two decades, consistently moving down in the first round and accumulating picks rather than chasing the top of the board. The Kansas City Chiefs have shown similar tendencies in recent years. These teams weren’t just being clever about roster depth — they were, consciously or not, taking the other side of a mispriced trade from teams anchored to the Johnson chart.
There is a limit to this arbitrage, of course. A quarterback who goes #1 overall has a value that no surplus model fully captures — the organizational lift, the marketing revenue, the franchise identity. And as more teams develop sophisticated internal valuation models, the gap between “chart price” and “true price” gradually compresses. The market corrects, slowly.
Why the Johnson Chart Persists
Here’s the really interesting question.
If the Thaler model has been public knowledge since 2005, why does the Johnson chart still circulate in NFL draft rooms?
Several reasons.
First, coordination: both sides of a trade need a common reference point, and the Johnson chart provides that even when both parties know it’s imperfect.
Second, organizational politics: a GM who trades down from the second pick and then watches the player drafted there win a Super Bowl will face questions no surplus value spreadsheet can answer. The Johnson chart provides cover.
Third, the chart’s inaccuracies are not uniformly distributed — for mid-round trades, it’s reasonably well-calibrated. The distortions concentrate at the extremes, particularly at the top of the first round.
And of course, there’s also the simple conservatism of an industry where decision-makers are judged against peers rather than against theoretical optima. Using the same chart as everyone else is safe. Departing from it requires explaining yourself.
The Takeaway for Analytically-Minded Fans
The next time you watch your team trade up to grab a receiver at pick #9, ask yourself: who won that deal? The Johnson chart will tell you it was roughly fair. The Thaler surplus model will tell you that there’s a high probability that the team trading down got the better end of the bargain.
The NFL draft is one of a remaining handful of markets where a publicly-known, empirically-validated mispricing persists year after year. Teams that understand the difference between perceived draft value and actual surplus value have a structural advantage over those that don’t — and they’ve had it for twenty years.
Want to dig deeper? The original Massey-Thaler paper titled “Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League” is available HERE. For a more recent treatment, The Ringer and For The Numbers have both published updated surplus value analyses incorporating the new CBA rookie wage scale, which has changed some of the specific numbers while leaving the core insight intact. Also, check out the NFL Operations joint project with Carnegie Mellon.
I’ve been living in the world of the Old Testament prophets for a long time now. The Eyes of Gehazi took me deep into the strange, volatile orbit of Elisha and his servant, Gehazi. The Prophet and the Queen dropped me into the exhausted, visionary mind of Jeremiah, taken hostage to Egypt. Both of those novels ask a lot of their readers — they’re long, layered, and they don’t apologize for it.
So I wanted to build a door.
The Unknown Prophet is a 17,000-word novelette — long enough to sink into, short enough to finish in an evening — and it’s only $.99 (Amazon won’t let me keep it free, but I’d like to).
It fictionalizes one of the strangest and least-discussed episodes in the entire Old Testament: the unnamed man of God from 1 Kings 13 who walks north alone, confronts a rebellious king at an idolatrous altar, watches God split stone and restore a withered arm, and then gets betrayed on the road home by an older prophet who should have known better. The story ends with a lion and a burial and a grief that has no clean resolution.
What I love about this story is what it doesn’t explain. The biblical text gives us almost nothing about who this man was, what he was thinking, or why he made the choice that killed him. That blank space is where I live.
If you’re new to my Prophetic Series, this is the place to start. If you’ve already spent time with Gehazi or Jeremiah, you’ll find the same world — the same dust and wind, the same God who is present and terrifying and not always easy to understand.
You can grab the ebook for only 99 cents on Amazon. If it finds you well, I hope you’ll wander further in.
The Halls of the Shadow King: Brittania Calls – Learn all about this fourth novel in the Halls of the Shadow King series!
Tod’s thoughts about the damage that Post-modernism has done to modern literature
The fourth book in The Halls of the Shadow King series is now available on Amazon Kindle. It’s called Britannia Calls, and is a Christian retelling of Celtic mythology (and possibly an Arthurian origin story!). Set twenty-something years after the adventures of Amal in the first three books in “The Halls of the Shadow King”. My intent is that the reader has the option to treat this as either the fourth book or as a standalone introduction to the series. Here’s the overview:
What are the highlights? Third-century Roman Britain. A red dragon sleeping under a Welsh mountain. A Christian awakening spreading through the island that the dragon finds deeply inconvenient. And a team sent from Antioch—led by Amal, the Shadow King—to do something about it.
They’re joined by Finn McCool and they briefly meet Taliesin. Yes, those two. One is an immortal Celtic warrior who has been fighting supernatural evil longer than most civilizations have existed. The other is a blind former druid who serves a different master now and carries scars from the last time he tried to face the dragon alone.
The early Christians in this story didn’t survive Roman persecution by being cautious people. They survived by being stubborn, brave, and entirely convinced that the darkness was going to lose eventually. A primordial dragon will test conviction in a cavern deep beneath Mount Snowdonia.
Britannia Calls is historical fiction rooted in the third century AD—a few years before the reign of Emperor Constantine. The narrative swims in early Celtic Christianity, and the pre-Roman mythological traditions of Ireland and Wales. The supernatural elements—dragons, Pattern-sight, binding rituals drawn from Hebrew and druidic traditions—are built on that historical and literary foundation, not cartoons layered on top of it.
If you’ve read The Apprentice or Into Deeper Waters, you already know Amal. If this is your first encounter with the series, Britannia Calls works as an entry point. The format keeps it focused—one mission, one mountain, one ancient enemy.
I’m already thinking about the next project. Another Old Testament prophet, most likely. Different era, different landscape, same fundamental conflict: someone who has been given a gift they didn’t ask for and a task they’d prefer to refuse. He won’t know what hit him.
Find Britannia Calls on Amazon (Kindle only): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GS3PDF8R
Paperback is available exclusively on my web store here at todnewman.com!
Reviews of the First Book in this Series
When a culture abandons the pursuit of objective excellence, it doesn’t simply become more inclusive of wider ranges of thinking—it becomes incapable of discernment.
Over the past three decades, we’ve witnessed a striking decline in literary quality (I don’t think this is terribly controversial–there are many indicators). I submit that this decline correlates directly with the ascendancy of postmodern thinking in academia and publishing. The culprit isn’t difficult to identify: when “good is merely a perspective” driven by an esoteric “System of Thought” becomes the operative philosophy, the distinction between mediocrity and mastery dissolves.
The postmodern project, at its core, represents a philosophical surrender. Rather than wrestle with the philosophical inconsistencies in Naturalism, then Realism, then Modernism, the postmodernists decided that solving these problems was impossible because truth itself was merely projected by dominant Systems of Thought. This was a pretentious error and we are now paying the bill.
By denying that there can be such a thing as “true good” in art, postmodernism hasn’t liberated us at all from oppressive standards—rather, it has left us defenseless against the tide of trivial and insupportable newly-born standards. When every text is merely another perspective, when every voice carries equal weight regardless of craft or vision, the result is predictable: the market floods with work that previous generations would have recognized immediately as unserious. Walk into any major bookstore today and survey the literary fiction section. You’ll find novels praised to the heavens by prestigious review outlets that lack basic narrative coherence, that substitute cleverness for wisdom, that mistake the transgressive for the profound. This isn’t an accident of taste. It’s the logical outcome of a system that has lost the vocabulary—and the courage—to say that some work is simply better than other work.
The academy, which once served as a guardian of literary standards, has become their primary subverter. English departments that once trained students to recognize excellence now teach them to deconstruct it to fit their preconceptions. This has brought us to the era where a literary PhD dissertation can be generated by an AI, and it is happening all over.
Close reading—that patient attention to how language achieves its effects—has given way to reading for power dynamics, for representations of identity, for the political implications of competing Systems of Thought. These approaches aren’t completely without value, but when they become the dominant approaches, literature ceases to be evaluated as literature. At that point, it becomes far easier to deconstruct the physical words on a page into representations that reflect whatever system the professional academic rewards. I’ve been occasionally surprised on the literary side of X to find academics who have creatively deconstructed religious works into polemics about post-industrial society and other fashionable concerns. The result? Entire generations of writers emerge from MFA programs unable to distinguish between craft and ideology, between a sentence that sings and one that merely signals. They’ve been taught that traditional notions of beauty, structure, and moral seriousness are suspect—tools of cultural hegemony rather than hard-won insights into what makes language live on the page.
The publishing industry—always responsive to cultural currents—has enthusiastically embraced the postmodern turn. Editors who might once have rejected a manuscript for technical deficiencies now celebrate those same deficiencies as formally innovative. Marketing departments that once sought to identify lasting work now scramble to ride waves of social media enthusiasm, no matter how shallow. Consider how contemporary publishing determines what’s worthy of publication. Increasingly, the question isn’t “Is this excellent?” but “Does this fill a slot in our diversity portfolio?” or “Will this generate the right kind of attention on Twitter?” These aren’t questions about literary merit. They’re questions about market positioning and cultural optics—and while both have their place in business decisions, when they crowd out questions of quality entirely, literature suffers. When there is no gate on the process for quality and excellence the bottom line becomes the only motivator. And if the bottom line itself is ignored, then political projection is probably the only remaining motivation.
The proof of this decline doesn’t require theoretical argumentation—it requires only that we read. Pick up a celebrated novel from 2020 and set it beside one from 1950. The difference in linguistic precision, in structural sophistication, in moral and intellectual seriousness is often startling. This isn’t nostalgia speaking. It’s the recognition that when a culture ceases to believe in excellence, it ceases to produce it. The postmodern response to this observation is predictable: “You’re merely privileging one aesthetic over another. Who are you to say Faulkner is better than Toni Morrison?” But this response itself reveals the problem. It treats evaluation as an arbitrary exercise in power (i.e., politics) rather than a learned skill requiring attention, knowledge, and intellectual humility. It assumes that because perfect objectivity is impossible, all judgments are equally subjective—a logical leap that would be easily recognizable as folly in any other field.
Recently, I was discussing books with an adult reading enthusiast who had discovered a new passion for H. Rider Haggard. His books are exciting “lost world” adventures written during the late 1800s, and the writing was considered accessible to young children of that era. My friend was surprised that young boys were drawn to these books in the past, because even the average adult reader would find the writing challenging today. There are scores of examples like this of what we have lost by losing our way regarding excellence in literature.
When we abandon the pursuit of objective literary standards, we lose more than just the ability to distinguish good books from bad ones. We lose the cultural infrastructure that allowed great writers to develop. George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—these writers emerged in cultures that, whatever their other failings, took literature seriously as a vehicle for communicating truth. They wrote for audiences that expected not just to be entertained or validated, but to be challenged, elevated, transformed. Today’s literary culture, by contrast, often seems content with books that function as mere mirrors—reflecting readers’ existing beliefs back to them, confirming what they already think about the world. This isn’t literature’s highest calling. It’s literature’s descent to valueless entertainment—essentially Vanity Fair from “Pilgrim’s Progress”.
The path forward requires recovering what postmodernism has taught us to abandon: the courage to discriminate between truth and falsehood, the willingness to say that some work achieves what other work only attempts. This doesn’t mean returning to a narrow canon or dismissing new voices, but rather means insisting that new voices, like old ones, be held to standards of excellence rather than given passes based on novelty or identity. Editors should be willing to reject manuscripts that fail to meet high literary standards, regardless of their political or cultural appeal. Critics need to be willing to write honest reviews rather than promotional copy. It means readers willing to demand more than what’s merely current or trendy. Most importantly, it means recovering the belief that drove the greatest writers of the past: that literature matters precisely because it can access truth, beauty, and moral wisdom in a genuine (but not infallible, of course) way.
When we believe there’s a “true good” worth pursuing in art, we create the conditions for excellence. When we don’t, we get what we have now: a literary landscape cluttered with forgettable cash generators (some of which is now machine generated…), while genuine talent goes unrecognized because we’ve lost the language to recognize it. The decline of contemporary literature isn’t a mystery. It’s the inevitable result of ideas taken to their logical conclusion. Postmodernism promised liberation from the struggle to define truth and beauty but all it delivered was mediocrity. The question is whether we have the cultural courage to admit it.
MORE BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman
POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman
If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy Novels authored by Tod Newman.
As a sympathetic agrarian with roots in a place very much like Wendell Berry’s beloved Port William, Kentucky, I am always quick to buy his latest work to hit the market. Pretty much all of my adult life has been spent with characters like Burley Coulter, Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, and Andy Catlett. They remind me of generations of my own people, often to a surprising degree. In a sense, Berry’s town has become real to me in a way no other fictional place ever has, even Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Not only does Port William exist in my thoughts and memories, I often feel longing for what has been lost there.
Berry’s latest novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, reinforces my sense of loss of the past because Berry spends much time dwelling in that place. The story is about his frequent narrator, Andy Catlett, reminiscing over his grandfather Marce, who managed his family farm behind a brace of mules and a plow. The action starts with a distant event when the tobacco buyers monopoly, the American Tobacco Company, uses their leverage to essentially rob Marce of a full year of labor—not just any labor, but one that was needed to provide a source of scarce income that could augment what the farm itself could offer to Marce’s family.
Andy only knew of this sad story from hearsay, and admits:
So Marce remembered it to Wheeler, who told it to Andy, who in a world radically changed needed a long time and great care to imagine what he heard, but as he has imagined it he has passed it on to his children, for the story has been, as it is still, a force and a light in their place. (p. 17)
One of the familiar complaints made by Berry is that progress in the form of tractors, automobiles, and cross-national linkages of trains changed outcomes for ordinary families who made lives from the soil. Marce sums up his beliefs about progress in describing his journey to Louisville on a train as only a man who was a master of his own work and place could:
They felt in their flesh the ruled line by which the railroad had pierced the living country, subduing its ancient contours to levels and slants and bends required by the machines that ever after would hurry regardlessly across it. (p. 19)
One well-worn thread through Berry’s books—especially the ones with Andy Catlett as narrator—is that of the “black sheep” that occasionally rose up in these families and found their way in the community. In Andy’s case, this beloved person was his uncle, an attractive rebel of sorts who always wound up involved in schemes and activities that embarrassed those who loved him. As Andy described his Uncle Andrew, “He was instead one in the sequence of feral offshoots that fairly regularly had dissented from it. He was not an outcast, because he had never been cast out.” (p. 57)
In this book, and indeed in many where Andy is the narrator, he is looking back on the past through an old man’s eyes. He recognizes that life has blessed him and that when younger he took it for granted. About this life, he notes that “He did not know how old it was or what it was worth or how threatened it had come to be. He did not begin consciously to honor and love it until he saw it going away.” (p. 68)
Eventually, after a successful period in the “big agriculture” world outside Port William, Andy returns home and regards the life his grandfather lived as his own native culture, one “shared and practiced in common by all the kinds and races of the country people, a possession of incalculable worth.” (p. 68)
There is nothing surprising in this book for a fan of Wendell Berry. What is unique, however, is the mating of Berry’s agrarian thought with the story of one of his characters. This makes this novel a halfway creation between Berry’s fiction and nonfiction writing. It isn’t as captivating as, say, his story-driven novel Hannah Coulter, but it contains much deep thought that the reader who avoids nonfiction might be surprised to learn.
The sadness around the demise of places with history born in love like Port William is palpable. Berry sagely notes that “Port William’s fatal mistake was its failure to value itself at the rate of its affection for itself.” (p. 110) He continues to describe that rather, the town had believed the values imputed on their small place by outsiders who saw progress as a 180-degree path away from the Port Williams of the world.
In the Bible, a lawyer asks a question of Jesus that is logical for one who lives in an elevated place in a community: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus takes the chance to show the lawyer the extent of his disconnectedness from life and love. In all of Wendell Berry’s books, this question whispers throughout the stories.
In Marce Catlett, we get a very clear declaration:
In stable and lasting communities, people become neighbors to one another because they need one another. The American story so far—which has been so far the Catletts’ story, which they have both suffered and resisted—has been the fairly continuous overpowering of the instinctive desire for settling and homemaking by the forces of unsettling: the westward movement, land greed, money hunger, false economy. The industrial replacement of neighborhood by competition and technology moves everything worthy of love out of reach. (p. 112)
Near the close, Andy’s memories of community, family, and neighbors have connected and are now one recollection:
His remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside the matter of fact of this world’s present age. He stands now with his father and his father’s father, and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have desired as if seen afar, that yet is the same, the very land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it. (p. 144)
The reader is left uncomfortably wondering if in our new age of progress, this ascendancy of life is any longer possible.
Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story is a meditation on memory, community, and the cost of what we call progress—essential reading for those who long for something beyond efficiency and growth.
On August 30th of 2026, I learned that Marce Catlett is officially the last book that Mr. Berry will ever write. I remain indebted to him for sharing his ideas and being influential in my life. If someday I make it back to the family farm and resume my Grandmother’s habit of plowing a large garden behind a mule, it will be due to Mr. Berry. Thank you sir, and rest in peace with your Savior.
MORE BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman
POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman
If you liked this review, you might like the many novels authored by the W. Tod Newman.
Frank Herbert’s Dune series is famous for its intricate world-building. Herbert meticulously explains the systems, methods, and politics that allow humanity to expand across the universe. He answers every question about plausibility before readers can ask it.
Michael F. Kane takes a different approach in his series beginning with After Moses—and it’s refreshing.
Kane clearly draws inspiration from Herbert. His chapters open with quotes from historical figures within his universe, and his stories unfold across a colonized solar system. But instead of exhaustive explanations, Kane uses a brilliant narrative shortcut: an AI named Moses once arose, solved humanity’s greatest challenges, and then vanished without a trace. Hence the title—everything happens “After Moses.”
This device liberates Kane’s storytelling. How do humans live on Ganymede? Moses invented gravity plates and environmental barriers. It’s reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism—the extraordinary simply exists, everyone accepts it, and life continues.
With technology explained away, Kane focuses on what matters most: character development.
Each chapter tells a self-contained story where characters face captivating challenges. The situations often seem dire, yet Kane’s light touch keeps readers from feeling overwhelmed. You trust these characters are equal to their trials. As the chapters accumulate, a larger narrative emerges, revealing the characters’ backstories and interconnections. And always, the central mystery lingers: Who was Moses, and what happened to him?
Kane’s writing style will feel familiar to fans of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide series. He has that same gift for witty banter and knows how to make you smile while telling a serious story. I found it thoroughly enjoyable.
If you’re searching for a new sci-fi author—especially one who writes honest stories about characters overcoming struggles with moral integrity—visit michaelfkane.com to purchase the series. Kane is an independent author well worth discovering.
MORE BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman
POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman
Buy Books authored by the same guy (Tod )
“You have set up a banner for those who fear you, that they may flee to it from the bow.” —Psalm 60:4
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the unimaginable has happened, perhaps across the whole earth. The reader learns of this through the eyes of a man (the Man) and his son (the Boy), and what McCarthy tells us through these two characters’ senses is stark. As with King David, who spent large portions of his life fleeing those who would take it, the characters are beset at every step—scavenging for the ever-more-unlikely can of food through abject danger from those who have learned to place all things below their own survival. Slavery, murder, and cannibalism are the tools the remaining few on Earth have learned to boost this urge to survive at the expense of all others.
But yet, there remains a banner of goodness, of hope, of God that barely remains. The reader frequently descends into disillusionment. Is this what might happen if human kindness descends fully into self-centeredness? McCarthy’s gritty prose sets the temperature of the novel throughout. Sparing with words, neglectful of polite punctuation, he serves up the most basic elements of a collapsed society. But still there are two who continue to hold the “fire” inside.
The Man—though he is one of the few survivors of the cataclysmic events that have destroyed most of the world’s flora and fauna—has a charter. He sees this as a gift from the God who has taken literally everything else away. Early in the novel as he scans the terrain for threats to his day’s journey down the cracking and bubbling interstate to the coast, he ponders this unclear but divine call.
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” (p. 3)
The descriptions of this fallen world abound. I have a hard time imagining any author other than McCarthy being able to communicate something so unthinkable to our expectations of excess.
“The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.” (p. 10)
Or the tyranny of needing to search for food in forsaken places that have been multiply ravaged by bands of nihilistic scavengers:
“In the morning they went on. Desolate country. A boar-hide nailed to a barndoor. Ratty. Wisp of a tail. Inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters, dried and dusty among the wan slats of light. There could be something here, the boy said. There could be some corn or something. Let’s go, the man said.” (p. 16)
Of the sadness of what has been lost, the reader is given this to experience as the Man inspects the fireplace of an abandoned family home for anything that may assist his survival:
“He felt with his thumb in the painted wood of the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago.” (p. 25)
Notable is the absolute mastery of the small, important things of the world that the Man has been able to demonstrate. McCarthy uses this, perhaps, as a foil to demonstrate how even the most competent and experienced can be beset by an evil world. Thinking here about King David in the wilderness. The Man knows how to survive. How did he learn this? Through good preparation before the disasters occurred? Through hard effort and good fortune afterwards? This remains unclear to the reader at the end of the novel, but what is made certain is that the Man has “the fire” to refuse to allow the evil to take him before he can develop his son into a Man who can survive the new reality. This book gives the reader much pause on the difficulties of the intentional protection and development of others.
The careful reader will seek out the hints that McCarthy provides of the persistence of the human spirit. They are few and can be missed. The Man takes some roadside cane and makes his son a flute as a distraction:
“The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.” (p. 81)
And as the Boy struggles with the painfulness of his existence and his desire to take a blissful-appearing death—like his mother had quietly done:
“You can’t. You have to carry the fire.” (p. 298)
Though this book won a Pulitzer Prize, many reviewers have chosen to wallow in the meaninglessness that McCarthy is able to weave while describing an utterly fallen world. Even Haiti in 2026 has not yet fallen nearly as far. I’ll admit that it is a true challenge to see through all the depressing atmosphere.
But the real story of the novel is McCarthy’s knowledge that even in the worst possible case for humanity, hope will somehow survive. Some of the very last words are spoken in hope about the Boy (and perhaps others like him yet to be met):
“The breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.” (p. 306)
The Road is well worth reading, even by more sensitive people. It speaks of preparedness, resilience, and the humanity of passionately holding to hope, even when the senses scream that hope has been destroyed and placed in its grave. Because then the spark is lit and who is to say what God will do with it.
Have you read The Road? What did you discover about hope in the darkest places? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
MORE BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman
POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman
Buy Books authored by the same guy (Tod )
