Blackburn — Bradley Denton

A dark comedy novel about "an America of petty injustices and vanished dreams, where a sensitive Kansas boy can grow into a killer" (Publishers Weekly).

Jimmy Blackburn grows up in the Midwest believing the things that adults tell him. He questions his teachers and they lie to him. He questions his parents and his father beats him. He questions the world and it hurts him.

And so Jimmy Blackburn becomes a killer, amassing at least twenty-one victims. They include law enforcers, writers, adulterers, auto mechanics, and other liars. . .

This is an exceptional novel, at once riotously funny and searingly potent: a vision of America through the eyes of the central bogeyman of our culture.

"Using stark, unadorned prose, Denton has created a modern-day parable illustrating the shades of good and evil and the meanings of life. Sometimes humorous but more often heart-wrenching, Blackburn delivers a knockout punch to rigid, self-satisfied thinking everywhere. Excellent." -- Library Journal