Description

Hurricane Season (portions of which have appeared in the Oxford American, Hunger Mountain, and PANK), tells the intersecting stories of Shy Walsh, a mixed martial artist on the cusp of stardom who loses a fight and retreats back to her childhood home in Florida, and Thomas Clayton, a doctor recently released from prison after serving seven years on a drug charge. Shy might be the greatest female fighter of her time, but a loss in a Vegas title fight, and the sneaking suspicion that she wanted to lose, sends her reeling back to her Central Florida home and her dying mother. She needs some perspective, she needs to pull herself together and deal with the traumas that have haunted her since childhood. But one day she meets Dr. Thomas Clayton by a camp ground swimming pool and everything changes. They fall in love, maybe, but Tommy has his own demons, What begins as an attempt to build a life together quickly devolves into a criminal enterprise that spans the state. Helpless in the face of addiction and guilt, and, most especially, the peculiar brokenness of being American in the 21st Century, Shy and Tommy descend into a nightmare existence of crime and isolation.

In the spirit of the great short novels of Joan Didion, the story is told by a narrator who tries to piece their story back together, all the while trying to make sense of his own life. Hurricane Season is a noir thriller about fighting and addiction, prison and drugs; but more than that, it is a love story set in the carnage of an America wrecked by inequality.