Iowa

After a chance meeting with the enigmatic and outspoken John Thomas Bantam, a third-party candidate for President of the United States, small-time union rep Greg Helter decides to leave his dull and safe Midwestern life and become the campaign manager for Bantam's lost-cause Gadfly Party. He hires a former college friend to be the controversial candidate's bodyguard, a menacing but intelligent mountain of a man named Jasper Callister with whom Helter shares the memory of a violent and disturbing event, and who may be harboring the combined anger and dissatisfaction of an entire nation within his giant body. With lonely and haunted amateur writer Lisa Yates riding along as the campaign's embedded journalist, Helter soon finds himself on an increasingly strange journey across the Hawkeye State, seeking votes and personal redemption... and a cure for the madness of modern life. A product of our soured times, as well as an artful commentary upon them, Iowa is a beautifully written novel of anger and endangered hope, a deeply personal and yet outward-looking work that reads like a cross between Edward Abbey and Hunter Thompson, but with the unique blend of poetic sensitivity and honest realism readers have come to expect from Todd Michael Cox.