About the Book
"It started with a miracle. It was a useless miracle, but it still counted as a jaw-dropper, a total malfunction of reason and time... I can burn my own bushes, so I have no patience for miracles."
Introducing the inimitable Milo Byers, a seventeen-year-old dropout whose brother is missing and mother has given up on life. In Lexington, Kentucky, Milo spends his nights being a bar bouncer and boosting cars while searching for his brother, who he suspects is a mysterious figure named "Nightwolf." Nightwolf stalks the streets, tagging local businesses, while wearing a trash-bag over his head with eyeholes cut out, and making nonsensical threats to local news outlets. Caught between rival heavies Thomas the Prophet and Egan Hopper, Milo must choose what he stands for and the type of adult he wants to be.
In Willie Davis's gritty, but affectionate portrayal of the new South, around every dark and harrowing corner, there is a tender and redemptive path forward.
Review :
"Even among Nightwolf's vivid landscape of smart-assed car thieves, bruised oracles, and horribly-named bar bands, Willie Davis's tender, witty voice utterly steals this show. Every page of this brilliant, tough-willed novel is so alive with laughter, vulgarity, insight, wonder, wisdom, and heartbreak, often within the same impossible breath. What a book."
--Mike Scalise, author of Brand New Catastrophe
"Davis, a master of wit, one-liners and dead on observations, has done everything right. Nightwolf, often funny and always smart, is told through the eyes of Milo, a devastatingly funny and keen social critic. And through him, this story of Kentucky and youth and angst and self-discovery gleams."
--Natashia Deón, author of Grace
"This is a story of profound loss--missing mothers, brothers, babies, hearts--populated by trash-talking, drug-addled, thieving, violent, wickedly funny, elegiac, fail and fail better prophets and preachers. Part Elmore Leonard, part Padgett Powell, part Eugene Ionesco if he'd trained his eye on the seediest corner of Lexington, Kentucky, Davis is a wildfire talent who understands there is no end to seeking, only endless reckoning with desire and mystery."
--Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away and Genealogy
"Nightwolf is by turns hilarious and tragic, acerbic and tender, despairing and triumphant--and brilliant withal. Willie Davis's kick-ass debut novel heralds the arrival of a major new talent."
--Ed McClanahan, author of The Natural Man and Famous People I Have Known
"The reader needs to tread carefully or he (or she as the case may be) will wind up as a character in Nightwolf and never be seen alive again. Happened to me. Nightwolf is delightful, compelling, utterly original, funny as hell, such a bright new light on the literary landscape it makes the turn of the century seem like ancient history."
--Gurney Norman, author of Divine Right's Trip and Kinfolks. Poet Laureate of Kentucky
Like a shotgun blast at the moon, Willie Davis' debut novel enters the world. At its heart is Milo Byers, wayward son of Prospect Hill, a derelict Kentucky neighborhood where violence is arbitrary and opportunity nil. Haunted by the memory of a brother who disappeared and caught up in a power struggle between petty criminals, Milo must navigate the injustices of growing up poor in a forgotten place. And yet this isn't your standard coming-of-age fare. Davis doesn't truck in clichés or serve up some superficial tale of redemption. Sure, teeth are broken and scars are formed, but Milo manages to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. He's literary kin to the protagonist in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son--a princely fuck-up and a worthy companion. Tragic, comic, and brilliantly perverse, Nightwolf is a bighearted novel heralds the arrival of a gifted storyteller. Read this book.
--Jesse Donaldson, author of The More They Disappear and On Homesickness
