Iowa

by Todd Michael Cox

After a chance meeting with the enigmatic and outspoken John Thomas Bantam, a third-party candidate for President of the United States, small-time union rep Greg Helter decides to leave his dull and safe Midwestern life and become the campaign manager for Bantam’s lost-cause Gadfly Party. He hires a former college friend to be the controversial candidate’s bodyguard, a menacing but intelligent mountain of a man named Jasper Callister with whom Helter shares the memory of a violent and disturbing event, and who may be harboring the combined anger and dissatisfaction of an entire nation within his giant body. With lonely and haunted amateur writer Lisa Yates riding along as the campaign’s embedded journalist, Helter soon finds himself on an increasingly strange journey across the Hawkeye State, seeking votes and personal redemption… and a cure for the madness of modern life. A product of our soured times, as well as an artful commentary upon them, Iowa is a beautifully written novel of anger and endangered hope, a deeply personal and yet outward-looking work that reads like a cross between Edward Abbey and Hunter Thompson, but with the unique blend of poetic sensitivity and honest realism readers have come to expect from Todd Michael Cox.

218 pages, Paperback

Published October 21, 2016

About the author

Todd Michael Cox was born in the northwoods of Wisconsin, and has been writing for most of his life. Although he's had short pieces published here and there he considers the novel to be his natural medium. His work ranges from comic adventures (like DIZZLEMUCK) to darker studies of death, mourning, and the loss and recapture of innocence in modern day America, along with everything in between (as in new novel WE ARE STRANGE CREATURES). He counts a disparate group of writers as influences, including Wallace Stegner, Hemingway, Harper Lee, Alice Munro, Edward Abbey, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, and Katherine Dunn. The influences of his young and formative years were more along the lines of Bradbury, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and a variety of strange and cheesy movies. Some of this interest still lingers, with traces of fantasy in works like WE ARE STRANGE CREATURES, which deals with kaiju attacking America... though in a far more serious and realistic way than old Godzilla movies.

"Nature's probably my greatest inspiration," Cox says. "Everything I need is found in nature, it compels me to create and care. If you can't find what you're looking for in wild places or the eyes of wild creatures, it probably doesn't exist."

Todd is also a wildlife lover, as well as a musician. His spoken-word project, Ripe For Shaking, has been included on a CD compilation from the Journal of Experimental Fiction called ATTOHO (After They Tore Our Heads Off). See also his TOMICO Bandcamp site (https://tomico.bandcamp.com/) for orchestral, ambient, and experimental pieces, along with other sorts.

His popular Wisconsin Unhuggables blog, originally hosted by Wisconsin Trails magazine but now found on Wordpress, is a collection of his thoughts and perceptions regarding the lesser-loved critters of the world. Todd was a featured guest on the Joy Cardin Show on Wisconsin Public Radio in Spring of 2013 to talk about these critters and his interest in them.

He is the founder of the Snake Anti-Defamation League.

He can be contacted via Twitter at: @TMCwrites

Or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/toddmichaelcox

Reviews

[Steven Nolan]

EVERYONE NEEDS TO READ THIS

[Troy Baumann]

Love the cover art, too!

[John Nondorf]

Beautifully written with obvious affection for the mid-western landscape and the people who populate it. Deftly constructed characters help to expose the flaws in U.S. society and politics. While I may not agree with all of the positions taken by the outsider, shoot-from-the-hip Presidential candidate, the questions he raises are important. The story is believable and crafted with suspense that definitely keeps the pages turning.

[Mavis Mather]

I really enjoyed this book. It was a great opinion of American politics and a wonderful slice of mid-western living. It is a book that when you finish it, you realize you need to revisit it again and again. Loved it.