Florida contains multitudes. It is many things to many people, and Kent Wascom (The New Inheritors; Secessia) explores this harshly and poetically in his fourth novel. The Great State of West Florida follows Rally, a 13-year-old boy in a U.S.A. torn apart by war, by ideas, by the question of what freedom can and should look like. His adoptive family grows more and more erratic, and he wonders what more could be out there as he faces constant homophobic slurs and "macho lunatic[s]." When he is whisked away in a maelstrom of bullets by his long-lost uncle, Rodney, now a professional gunslinger, he meets his robot-armed cousin, Destiny, who starts to fill in the gaps of how Rally fits into this vision of America. He sets out to "Go West," into bigger and greater trouble; factions seek to control what is left of West Florida, and their conflict will not end with the two sides shaking hands.
Wascom's novel reads as if William Faulkner wrote a screenplay for a Quentin Tarantino spaghetti western, which is to say that the sentences brim with decadent imagery (e.g., "the present is a scorpion and history's its tail, bent to sting itself"), while the violence and dialogue rocket like an orchestra's crescendo. Wascom creates characters that are more than pulpy archetypes, carrying both nuance and depth. He gives readers a Florida with angry people and too much violence to know what to do with, but also with a desperate hope for peace and a yearning for serenity on the Gulf Coast. --Dominic Charles Howarth, book manager, Book + Bottle