Dillo

by Max Sheridan

Artesia, New Mexico. Pop. 3012. There’s nothing 14-year-old Doc Candy likes better on a hot summer afternoon than snapping pictures of dead armadillos off Route 82. Until a no-good grifter of a father he hasn’t seen in eight years comes blowing up to his window at two in the morning in a hot El Camino talking about a family vacation in Miami. Their Florida reunion turns into a 2000-mile getaway when Doc finds out the money used to pay for the trip was stolen from his lowlife uncle, the manager of an illegal Apache casino. But it isn’t until they’re hiding out in the Louisiana bayou that Doc learns the whole it isn’t Doc’s uncle they’re running from. It’s a coal black Dodge Ram driven by a pair of bald, psychopathic teenage collectors looking to complete their gallery of human head hair toupees with the old man’s scalp. Praise for “Pulpier than a box full of blood oranges, with the best, weirdest father/son road trip this side of a Waylon Jennings song.” —Joshua Corin, author of Nuclear Winter Wonderland “At some point in their lives, everybody in Dillo has been tossed to the curb or run over by a bus, and Sheridan’s action-filled, father-son road trip is that much grittier and truthful for its hard-leather characters. A wicked new voice in crime and noir. A story that pulls you deep into the thorns. Writing that sings.” —Jack Getze, fiction editor Spinetingler Magazine “The elements are all A memorable cast of characters wherein even the minor actors are given weight, a compelling and original road story, the precise amount of description to keep that southwestern sun bearing down on your shoulders at all times, and a fluid prose that allows the reader to turn the pages with the ease of an El Camino cruising across a battered American highway.” —Alec Cizak, author of Down on the Street “A fresh voice taking on uncharted portions of the American literary landscape. Unique, funny, and wholly Max Sheridan’s.” —Tom Pitts, author of American Static

230 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 6, 2017

About the author

Max Sheridan is the weirdo who wrote the novels Dillo and God's Speedboat, and the Pushcart unshortlisted classics A Penis Boot, Mud Hustler, and I Went to Work at IKEA After Bobby Got Killed at the Bowling Alley. Find his latest tale, Bobby Two Winds, in Pulp Queer Westerns.

Reviews

[Jim Thomsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Less a plotted story than a shaggy fireside tall tale of a father-and-son Southern road trip through a Coen Brothers-meets-Jim Thompson chicken-fried hell, DILLO scores on the strength of its author's uniquely skewed, darkly comedic worldview. Consider this observation of an orgasm from a fifteen-year-old boy's point of view: "It looked like she was getting tickled from the inside out by a thousand liquid feathers, her whole body, in her throat even, and her mouth was working into smiles she didn’t even know about. She shook gently like that for about half a minute."

And then there's my favorite line, which might as well serve as DILLO's back jacket copy:

"When you see a college quarterback with tears in his eyes dedicating his Heisman trophy to his old man, who did nothing but beat on his ass until he could turn a crow on a telephone wire inside out with that pigskin, there’s a reason. Same reason you sometimes read about father-son teams hitting up 7-Elevens with their masks on backwards. Your flesh-and-blood father could run off for five whole years and when he comes back, and he puts you in the front seat of a flashy borrowed automobile, you’ll still be willing to listen to whatever monkey plans he’s hatched in his absence. You might even just follow him."

If prose like that pushes your pleasure buttons, you'll love DILLO.