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The Dead Fathers: Grief and Poker in the West Desert
Paperback
Publisher Price: $21.95
ISBN13: 9781961471238
Publisher: By Common Consent Press
Published: Jun 17 2025
Pages: 512
Weight: 1.16
Height: 1.03 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
After his wife's affair, Christopher Twist flees to Utah's West Desert to be alone. e universe has other plans... Crowded by four-wheel riders, corporate prospectors, urban rednecks, and polygamists, Christopher is visited every night by his ancestors, who play poker and prophesy about a battle that will soon ravage both sides of the veil. As the second war in heaven thunders toward him, Christopher must revamp what he thought he knew about the cosmos.
***
John Bennion is at it again. Spin meets Ruth at the End of the World and Ezekiel's Third Wife in his new novel, The Dead Fathers: Grief and Poker in the West Desert, where questions of chance, of environmental catastrophe, of gender and authority and fundamentalist delusions, all collide. Protagonist Christopher Twist deals with his dead ancestors and his living family, philosophizing, wandering, conversing in words sacred and profane. What are prime causes, what are effects? What are the roles of minor individuals in major conflicts? As in all Bennion's novels, there's much to mine here-literally, this time. This is deep stuff, mines and mazes real and metaphorical. Once again, John Bennion invites us into and beyond his characters' twistiest explorations.
-Julie J. Nichols, author of Pigs When They Straddle the Air
The Dead Fathers: Grief and Poker in the West Desert is a busy novel set in a deceptively quiet landscape: a multitude inhabits Utah's stark and gorgeous West Desert, manifestations of an old man's fractured mind and heart. The abundant cast conjures myth and magic, philosophy and theology, politics, physics, history, sense and nonsense. Ancestors and descendants compete for validation. Conscience disturbs habits of compliance. Senescence clings to tender nostalgia and primal hurt. All of this makes for an engrossing read, but the plot's through-line is the real reward: accumulating gestures of desire, of mature marital reinvention despite-or maybe because of-a long season of disillusion. Read this novel with slow pleasure, immersed in dry water-a sweeping yet intimate landscape John Bennion understands like no other author I have read.
-Karin Anderson, author of Before Us Like a Land of Dreams, What Falls Away, and Things I Didn't Do
This is a novel obsessed with opposites, starting with its very form. It's a novel about a man who would be alone in deserted space. Yet this novel provides him with all sorts of company, from strangers to his wife, from the living to the dead, from the Three Nephites (one of whom is a woman, did you know?) to cryptobiotic soil. He is visited almost nightly by his dead father, grandfather, and great-great-grandfather. He is visited by polygamists and an Army general. He is discovered by a brilliant Dutch philosopher/scientist. Yet The Dead Fathers, for all the noise and chaos, never stops being quiet and still.
-Theric Jepson, author of Just Julie's Fine and Byuck, co-editor of Monsters and Mormons, and editor of Irreantum
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