Back to the Dirt: A Novel

by Frank Bill

Overview

Frank Bill is back with a gritty, wrenching novel from deep inside the traumas of a broken American heartland.

Miles is a Vietnam veteran who’s worried he’s going to lose his job—and with it his tenuous grasp on a stable life—over a fight with a coworker. His PTSD and struggles to control his steroid-fueled violent tendencies also complicate his relationship with his girlfriend, Shelby, a stripper who only occasionally displays the proverbial heart of gold. She’s certainly kinder and more generous than her brother, Wylie, who has been implicated in the deaths of two local Oxy dealers and is currently on the run. When Wylie kidnaps Shelby and holes up in Miles’s country lair, it all threatens to become a bit too much for Miles.

As Frank Bill peels back the layers of Miles’s history, going deep into his memories of the Vietnam War, Back to the Dirt gets to the root of the traumas that have caused Miles and his community so much adversity. In this blistering novel, Bill reaches for the core values—living close to the land, working with your hands—that have been obscured by generations of neglect, drug abuse, and desperation. This is a profound and important story of an America that is only beginning to get its due attention—and Frank Bill is its most visceral, essential chronicler.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374534431
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Frank Bill is the New York Times bestselling author of The Ravaged, with Norman Reedus; the novels The Savage and Donnybrook, the latter of which was turned into a film in 2018; and the story collection Crimes in Southern Indiana, one of GQ’s favorite books of 2011 and a Daily Beast best debut of 2011. He lives and writes in southern Indiana.

Editorial Reviews

What you have in front of you is a highly explosive mix of pain, regret, and what it means to be American in these perilous times. Which is to say you are holding the literary equivalent of dynamite. Over his three previous books Frank Bill has, in the words of Robert Stone, stared 'the grey rat in the eye.' Addiction, PTSD, wars at home and abroad—Frank Bill never flinches. This gorgeous, heart-breaking novel has everything we've come to expect, and more still. It's his best work, so be careful."

—Mark Powell, author of Lioness and Hurricane Season

"Back to the Dirt is Frank Bill at his most personal and profound, an unflinching ode to his Indiana roots and tone poem to the war that haunted countless families along the Ohio. This is a story of leg-breaking, heart-crushing power, a kaleidoscope of factory life, addiction, rural blight, country justice and the spiritual scars bore by our veterans, all rendered with the grit, grace and devotion of a master stonecutter. This is the novel Bill was born to write.”

—Peter Farris, award-winning author of The Devil Himself and Last Call for the Living

"Bill draws wrenching parallels between battle and family-abuse trauma through evocative hallucinations, survival-of-the-fittest settings, and disarming compassion... Bill’s descriptions are both ugly and beautiful, often merging the hunt with Miles’ Vietnam flashbacks, capturing the realities of those resigned to being left behind and the violence that offers short-lived power."

—Booklist (starred review)

"Bill’s feverish latest shines a light on an American heartland blighted by crushed dreams and debilitating addictions... With kinetic prose, Bill keeps up the pace and delivers a steady supply of grisly details... It makes for one hell of a ride. "

—Publishers Weekly

"Frank Bill is the king poet of PTSD, whether it comes from foreign wars or the domestic battlefields of factory work. Bill knows what you lose to them, but also what you gain. Back to the Dirt is uncompromising, brutal, and brilliant.”

—Benjamin Whitner, author of Cry Father

From the Publisher

2023-03-14
Grim, violent, and chock-full of mayhem and despair—welcome back to Frank Bill country.

Miles Knox is an aging Vietnam vet, well-meaning but prone to steroid-fueled rage—and tortured still by what he saw and did in country. Shelby McCutchen is his much-younger girlfriend, a stripper forced to take care of the fragile and damaged men in her family: her painkiller-addicted twin, Wylie, and her drunk and deeply unpleasant father. When Wylie is sought for the coldblooded double murders of his oxy dealers—sought by the slow and irrelevant forces of the law but also, more dangerously, by Nathaniel, the resourceful ex-cop whose brother was one of the victims—he holes up at Miles’ rural fishing camp, with Shelby as a kind of hostage. Meanwhile Miles (when he’s not distracted by brutal fistfights, flashbacks, job worries, and even an industrial accident) begins in a haphazard way to search for her...and he and Nathaniel eventually join forces, though at this point (it’s a long story) Miles, having suddenly been introduced to LSD, is inhabiting a hallucinatory world that's equal parts southern Indiana now and southern Vietnam then. The book is not so much gritty as relentlessly grim—at its bleakest it seems a kind of ruin porn focused not on bombed-out buildings but on bombed-out people—but it does move quickly, with plenty of surprises, and it provides the all-hell-broke-loose tumult one expects from Bill. Reading it is like mainlining testosterone and hopelessness...and whether or not that seems like a compliment to you will give a good sense of whether you’re the intended audience.

All ain’t well in the heartland.

Kirkus Reviews