Junkie, Indiana

When Cordelia falls for Jordan, the older teenager who lives across the way in Shady Acres Trailer Park, she has no notion of the price that love can extract. But Jordan's a junkie—like his cousin Adam, their mothers, aunt and a dismaying proportion of the people in Chuterville, Indiana; liberated from the city, heroin now powders the Corn Belt. The daily imperative is to get high, no matter what—no easy task in a rusting old industrial town where the surest way to make money is to dismantle the abandoned factories and take the pieces to the scrap yard. Meanwhile, Adam's business model of dealing drugs on a modest scale so that he and his cousin can stay high collapses as their tolerance increases.

Cordelia learns something that threatens the cousins' freedom, and they try to shut her up—turn her world upside down and throw her into hell, forcing her to take the only decisive action she can.

A third cousin, Paul, narrates this acutely observed and very bleak tale, torn from the chronicles of the Midwest's opioid epidemic.

 A fable of the RV lifestyle in a Kansas Eden, complete with serpents!

The Wedding on Big Bone Hill

After losing his lover and (in the wake of 9/11) his job, Jack hits the road in a classic RV on the quest for Paradise, USA. It seems he’s found it in a summer job at a bucolic Kansas park, but this Eden turns out to be as tricky as the original. The head ranger, soon to marry Donna atop Big Bone Hill, lets Donna’s father, Percy, an ex-con who is a stickler for the rules, run the park.

Percy's conviction is that everybody tries to get away with something, but that anyone once allowed to get away with anything will try to get away with more, and he (if he alone) can see where that leads—he being the poster child for getting away with nothing. His constant search for infractions keeps the whole community on edge, including his widow friend Maureen, Dennis (who runs the entrance booth), and the Beanblossoms, workamper entrepreneurs who introduce into Eden the shirtless Rick.

A little boy goes missing on the late summer weekend when The Wedding on Big Bone Hill is to take place, and Percy undertakes the lonesome task of meting out justice—threatening tragedy in an otherwise ruefully funny celebration of the upside-down underpinnings of an American microcosm.

Queer's Progress

My family is more fucked up than the norm, OK? That’s why I work like a maniac, to keep out of the house. Not that it helps, when everyone I meet is so fucked up.

That’s how Queer’s Progress, a compelling story of young love, opens. The speaker is Edward, Cuban-born CCNY honor student and a page at the New York Public Library (“just a page, not a whole book or anything”). Edward is handsome, charming, reeking of sex.

Ned, who’s seen it all before, adds his voice when Andrew, a young scholar new to town, falls in love with Edward at first sight and seeks the older man’s guidance.

Ned’s the self-styled master of gay Manhattan—founder of "Gays Reaching Out” and author of a bestselling manual, How to Score Tonight. He offers hands-on instruction as required, but is more interested in using Andrew’s publishing connections to kick-start his own languishing literary career than in aiding his love life.

Andrew makes stumbling progress through gay New York in pursuit of Edward. But Edward, in flight from a pregnant hookup, leaps from his mom’s Harlem apartment to flop on his oldest friend’s floor, his best friend’s couch, Andrew’s bed, the West Side Y, a patch of ivy in Central Park—and a jail cell or two. Ned’s machinations come to naught as Queer’s Progress races relentlessly toward a classic, but surprising, inevitability. It’s a tale by turns savage and urbane, lyrical and full of wit-burnished emotion.

Harvey Joiner (1852-1932)

The Man in the Balloon:
Harvey Joiner's Wondrous 1877

This lively biographical study, impeccably researched and copiously illustrated, is the first ever published on Harvey Joiner, once a well-known American painter.

It brings Joiner to life as a 25-year-old prankster in Jeffersonville, Indiana, a rip-roaring river town where he finds himself at the crossroads of his career. The witty wood-engraved advertising images that have occupied him since he was a teenager have ceased to sell, and he is beginning to paint the pictures he will become known for, especially the landscapes that, evoking the region's beech groves, filter the light falling from their green-leafed canopies through personal responses and meanings. Moreover, he promotes himself nonstop, placing items about his pictures in local newspapers and hobnobbing with the gentry and painting their portraits.

But Joiner will stave off adulthood a little longer with a series of pranks, launching hot air balloons of increasing size, until his biggest--seen to be carrying a man in its basket--soars across the Ohio River and the rooftops of Louisville, Kentucky.

Before his wondrous year is out, Joiner's teetotal pledge attracts patrons who give him the commission of a lifetime, and he paints his masterpiece, Ruth Gleaning in the Fields of Boaz, for the Utica (Indiana) Christian Church. Analyzing the complex Bible story of how Ruth achieves security, he places the young widow in harvest fields at day's end, a moment of respite and possibility he makes personal by recalling his own widowed mother's dilemma and depicting the very fields of his boyhood.

In The Man in the Balloon: Harvey Joiner's Wondrous 1877, an American painter steps out of the shadows of neglect.

 An impatient Depression-era heiress hurries her inheritance along!           

                      All That Money

Inspired by Real Events.   Celebrity crimes often breed rumors that the victim was complicit.   In the Lucie Spode White kidnapping case, the rumors are true.

Falls City's sexy Depression belle is a high-living heiress whose stingy husband expects her to get by on her pin money. She's only 25 and won't come into her inheritance until she's 30. How can she possibly make it? Generous—if ruthless—with her favors, when she can't raise the cash for a room at a hot-pillow motel, Lucie enlists her handsome young lover, Harry Thrall, in a scheme to anticipate part of her inheritance. Just a prank. Can't be a crime if she's in on it, right?

Though pants-on-fire Harry worries that one of them (and he knows who) will end up on Death Row while the other lives it up on Easy Street, he enters into the spirit of the thing.   After all, if he's ever going to get to Hollywood, Harry needs money, too.

So off they go, and in come reality and the F.B.I.   Lucie finds herself trapped in a closet with a gash in her head, while G-Men dog Harry across the country.

Inspired by the sensational 1934 kidnapping of Mrs. Alice Speed Stoll, All That Money is a fast-moving reverse mystery that takes a rollicking ride with Lucie, Harry, her hapless husband, great relations—and square-jawed Special Agent Joe Albright, sniffing out the trail!

Rex Black builds his comedy club into a global entertainment brand!

                     Good People

Steven Key Meyers was born on a farm on the western slope of Colorado and lives in darkest Indiana. He is at work on two new novels, Family Romance and Another's Fool.