This Side of Jordan: A Novel - Tapa dura

Did I mention how good the writing is? The writing is excellent... The setting is so vivid I felt like I could fall into the book and lose myself there, landing on some dusty road in a tourist camp where the hicks waited to be fleeced or killed by Chester.--Cory Doctorow

Monte Schulz has proven that his father isn't the only Schulz with considerable storytelling talent. ... Schulz manages to capture a moment in history, a piece of humanity in transition. It's bleak, but funny, and smartly written. ...[R]eaders of good fiction should appreciate what Schulz has accomplished.--Michael C. Lorah

Schulz proves himself to be a handy wordsmith in this literally ambitious novel of pre-Depression America. Hand this straight-faced and multifaceted almost-satire to fans of the southern gothic tradition, all the way from Flannery O'Connor to John Kennedy Toole.

This Side of Jordan, Monte Schulz's literary prose novel, is told in the voice of a lost generation hurtling toward the Great Depression. In the spring of 1929, 19-year-old consumptive farm boy Alvin Pendergast finds an invitation for a late-night slice of pie is too seductive to pass up and before he knows it, he crosses the Mississippi River and finds himself working for a slick con artist named Chester Burke, formerly a gangster out of Chicago. With Alvin in tow, Chester embarks on a series of bank robberies and senseless murders through the small towns of America's middle border, peopled with vivid, outsized literary characters. Fortunately, Alvin finds another companion on his journey, a lonely, eccentric, and grandiloquent dwarf named Rascal. At first too ill to flee, too morally weak to object, Alvin must make a decision: stick with Chester, who would surely kill him at the slightest hint of betrayal, or muster the courage to stake his life on Rascal's clever plan (which includes a circus) to save them both. What Alvin discovers about the meaning of home offers a solution to escape and freedom.