Florida Palms

Pan debuts with a gritty but overlong tale of two working-class teenagers who break bad after graduating from high school on Florida’s Space Coast. It’s 2009, and Eddy and Cueball face a dim future amid the recession. Cueball’s father, Bird, an ex-con who served time for drug trafficking, offers them a job driving a van for his furniture moving company. This leaves the friends plenty of time to fish and smoke weed, and for Eddy to hang out with his no-nonsense girlfriend, Gin. Then, Bird’s former crime boss, Seizer, convinces him to use the company as cover to transport a new designer drug up the East Coast, and Bird brings Eddy and Cueball into the scheme. The two friends soon find themselves in the middle of a power struggle between Bird, Seizer, and a rival gang, with their lives and Gin’s on the line. While the narrative loses sight of Eddy, Cueball, and Gin for long stretches, spending too much time on Bird’s byzantine attempts to turn his small-time operation into a cartel, Pan convincingly portrays life in the shadow of the region’s monolithic aerospace industry. The Space Coast atmosphere hasn’t been more pungent on the page since Patrick Ryan’s The Dream Life of Astronauts. (July)