Breakfast with the Dirt Cult

Rude, raw, and rambunctious, this tour of duty into the no man's land of sex, politics, and societal expectations gleefully bashes politically correct gospels. Army solider Tom Walton's life is altered by a chance meeting with ex-stripper Amy, who promises him "a passionate affair" if he returns from Afghanistan. Amy is a sensuous metaphor for Tom's evolving love-hate relationship with the human condition; her sensuality is a ghost haunting him, from the evocatively captured misery of military training to the terror of deployment. But, if Tom makes it back to Amy, is he facing another battle in her arms? Finaly creates in Tom a contradiction of good humor and angst, parading instead of disguising his emotional warts. Occasionally overwritten and erratic in structure, this intense semiautobiographical novel is as much a sobering examination of a man's maturity as it is a righteous condemnation of self-serving cultural roles. Fiction as it should be: dangerous, hurtful, and cathartic.