In Shining Man, narrator Cash, an over-educated but under-achieving fry cook, decamps from a long period of overzealous floundering in suburban Charlotte, N.C., to either find his vanished father in Chicago or settle his affairs, whichever comes first. The mission ultimately throws his own life into stark relief. The book explodes themes of economic opportunity (or its inverse), identity and the individual’s place post-Great Recession in an increasingly politically polarized, culturally isolated and class-stratified America, through the eyes and voice of a young Southerner whose compatriots include both left-wing demonstrators and racecar crew members.
The book has its genesis with a brief sketch of a short story about a young man much like myself in the year 1999, maybe 2000 — unemployed, loveless, unencumbered in most any way but for the restrictions that come with a relative dearth of cash with which to procure the stuff necessary to be alive and well in an urban environment. In that story, an inversion of the trope of invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece Invisible Man, the skeleton of this book’s narrator emerged through the mystery of the central act. A man stitches a suit of armor from reflective fabric with which to illuminate the idiosyncracies, prejudices and predilections of those he encounters. As with life, however, fiction cannot be quite so simple. I wrote two other books and my age approximately doubled before history finally caught up with the character, of a fashion, and Shining Man took shape. The result is as much the product of that fist bit of creative desperation as it is the living history of my first two decades in the 21st century — perpetual motion, grasping for a center post, an overhead handhold, to keep from falling out. I’ve done a decent job maintaining control. Here’s hoping you have, too, and enjoy this ride. … You can pick up the book via the publisher’s website here.
REVIEWS and EXCERPTS
Shining Man recalls Don Quixote in many ways, with a broken-down Ford Taurus standing in for the faux-knight’s nag Rocinante, and a series of fetching young women filling the role of Dulcinea, the lofty princess. What’s missing from Cash’s quest is idealism, the essence of Quixote’s impossible dream. Cash is defined instead by his disillusionment and lack of passion. The novel is set in the time of the Occupy protests, whose central tenets Cash agrees with. Rather than join the movement, however, he remains detached until the momentum of events forces him to make critical decisions. True to the picaresque genre, Dills’ hero bounces from place to place, leaving readers to wonder if Shining Man will ever find a home.
—Sean Kinch in “Learning how to be,” Chapter 16
Dills shows himself to be a terrific writer of revelry, and he engagingly depicts camaraderie among fellow artists, and among low-wage workers — particularly bartenders and kitchen staff. Cash’s capacity for drink and introspection also doesn’t go unappreciated by others. “You have lived the lives that men lead, quiet desperation, man,” says Carl, a literary magazine editor. “Fucking Thoreau, dude. You’re the mass of men.” In the novel’s final act, the author highlights Cash’s paranoia as he uncovers the true identity of “Suited Man” and begins to piece together another ugly truth about a terrible accident at the racetrack, which may not have been an accident, after all.
An often endearing book about an ongoing search for meaning.
—Kirkus Reviews
Advance commentary on Shining Man
“Chicago and the American South abound with notable and influential literary traditions, and Todd Dills’ novel Shining Man pulls off the impressive feat of channeling both over the course of its expansive narrative. It’s a modern-day picaresque with a protagonist who finds himself equally at home — and not — in a car-racing pit crew and an anarchist bookstore. It’s a book about the allure of wanderlust, the mysteries of family, and the hidden conspiracies that manipulate us in unexpected ways, prompting the proverbial equal and opposite reaction when hidden no more. What’s not to like?”
—Tobias Carroll, author of the novel Reel and Transitory, a collection of shorts.
“Meet Cash — no relation to Johnny — of outer Charlotte, N.C.: fry cook, would-be performance artist, race-team tire carrier, self-isolating twenty-something basement dweller, loser at love and most everything else, living a life of metamorphosis that tells him character may be destiny, that what people see in him depends almost entirely on what they want to see in themselves. So he stands, shining for the passersby in traffic, and becomes something else. Fantastical, intense, surreal and original, Shining Man is an impressive literary contribution from a serious writer. Read it!”
–Marc Mayfield, author of the memoir In the Driver’s Seat: Interstate Trucking — a Journey and the novella On Grove Street
With the publication of Todd Dills’ Shining Man, Livingston Press continues to redefine the meaning and scope of Southern literature in the Anthropocene. Although the South is the book’s focal point, this is also a picaresque road novel, the narrative roaming abroad to Chicagoland — how the South follows and haunts its native sons well beyond its technical borders. A father’s absence paralleled by Lincoln’s assassination, the son’s patrimony is this: boxes of purloined high-visibility reflective traffic safety vests out of which the son fashions strange body suits in which he haunts the nocturnal byways. This box of vests shall be his salvation, or perhaps nothing at all. In an era in which work has become meaningless, he drifts from job to job. In a novel in which W.J. Cash is invoked to explain Southern psychopathology, I recognize Dills’ vision of the South, and I do not have an answer to his character’s question: “But why the fuck was I in Birmingham?” Because “Birmingham,” a character says, “was preferable to San Diego” and probably almost anywhere else for Shining Man.
–Amos Jasper Wright, author of Nobody Knows How It Got This Good
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From literary New South yarn to end-of-days dirge, buoyant realism and slapstick satire, the tapestry of style and genre in the 14 collected short stories in Triumph of the Ape screams with themes of American folly. Written over the first decade of the 21st century, the stories reach back into the past of the author’s native South Carolina, forward into a grim future where love — and no shortage of laughter — nonetheless remain humanity’s best hopes.
REVIEWS and EXCERPTS
Fiction Writers Review interview feature, “A journey to find your place,” with the author
Vol 1. Brooklyn “Death in Hammond” short featured
Cabildo Quarterly No. 4 “Z’s Trinity” short featured
Vol 1. Brooklyn “Like a fusion of Barry Hannah and Touch & Go Records.”
BadatSports “…the guys with Morrissey haircuts actually want to be Morrissey, or at least wistfully sensitive and sexy and queering like Morrissey. They are not lazy shadows; these characters talk about race and God and money in their own voices, not as cyphers…”
HTML Giant “…the existential yearnings of youth, the ire of smart, but directionless, manchildren…”
decomP “…that frustratingly unshakable force, the hegemony of the other side — the inside — that recurs throughout this book. ‘WE ARE OUT HERE,’ those lesser primates, the Stupidist writers, proclaim. They are outside this restrictive, oppressive world. Or they want, in their petty protests, to pretend to be…”
THE2NDHAND No. 37 “The Stupidist Manifesto” featured
From the Afterword by Spencer Dew:
“Triumph reads, as a whole, like a book might if written by a man who finally, reaching the beach, realizes the bits of wreckage half buried in the sand are everything that mattered, the places of dreams and opportunity. The damn dirty apes win….”
Advance commentary on Triumph of the Ape:
A tremendous collection! Triumph of the Ape outlines the highs and lows of comically self-conscious young men bumming around the free, modern world, armed only with mind, heart and humor. These stories are bursting with warmth and smart lovin’. Reading Todd Dills makes life — all of it — feel a little bit kinder.
–Patrick Somerville, author ofThe Cradle
Triumph is dauntless, daring in its variety of tones and styles, a kind of taunt to the new century and all its ongoing crises. There’s the spirited, Southern slant of the Barry-Hannah-esque “Color of Magic” and “Confederate Yankee…,” and elsewhere, the author’s ongoing interest in forms, especially the itinerary, shifts toward the collection’s centerpiece, an imagining of the development of a underground literary movement around a “Stupidist Manifesto.” Realism, noir, short short — from lascivious to hilarious — the range of styles culminates with one-part music essay, one-part end-of-days fabulism, in the closing sound track to the coming Rapture. Again and again, there’s invention, Dills’ inexhaustible gift for language and tireless imagination.
—Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps, Hairstyles of the Damned
Every story in Triumph of the Ape reveals characters “united in stupidity, not necessarily dumb or incapable of love but senseless with self-love,” typical of Dills’ weirdly entertaining Faulkner-in-the-city touches. Perhaps no other working writer has so benefited from living in two very distinct environments, first the South, then years in Chicago, then back to the South, with countless time spent on the road to here, there and everywhere. Dills deals in lore for apes triumphant in the downfall. He once again proves himself a master of tradition gone haywire in a country addicted to its own mythology, supplying the antidote with his 21st-century folklore.
—Paul A. Toth, author of Airplane Novel
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Billy Jones and his dad have a score to settle. Up in Chicago, Billy drowns his past in booze. In South Carolina, his father saddles up for a drive to reclaim him. Caught in this perfect storm is a ragged assortment of savants: shape-shifting doctor, despairingly bisexual bombshell, tiara-crowned trumpeter, zombie senator.
Reviews, notes, errata
Sons of the Rapture is a gloriously ambitious achievement. Dills has crafted a novel that’s as slick, crafty and wise as an Upcountry political fixer. —The Elegant Variation
Todd Dills is a strong and confident storyteller who is able to warp and bend time.
—Razorcake Magazine, Spring 2007
Wildly entertaining, technically astounding and moving to the last…
—Punk Planet, Fall 2006
The literary equivalent of the Fourth of July — as technically inventive as it is truly intimate and heartfelt, this fiery novel draws upon the grand mythology of the old testament and the profundity of Faulkner’s best work. It’s powerful storytelling and a reconciliation of our shared conflicts and histories.
—Joe Meno
In Sons of the Rapture, Todd Dills weaves a new kind of contemporary Southern yarn. His alluringly warm narrative mediates the rawness of a rich but divisive society and reminds us that simmering right beneath the present is a not-too-distant brutal past.
—Emily Pohl-Weary