From the beloved author previously compared to Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates ( Washington Post ), a startling and unconventional neon-pink Western of vengeance, family, and first love as two warring factions vie for control of a blood-soaked Gulf Coast It’s 2026, and Rally is thirteen years old. The long, hot Louisiana summer looms before him like a face-melting stretch of blacktop, and the country is talking civil war while his adoptive family acts more vicious than ever. Rally spends his days wondering about his dead father’s people, the Woolsacks of West Florida, who long ago led a failed rebellion to carve their own state from the swamp and sugar-sand of the coast. That family might have been his too—if his mother and a crew of vigilantes hadn’t tried to kill them all back when he was a baby. Rally lives in the shadow of guilt and in fear of the only other survivors: his uncle Rodney, now a professional gunfighter on the app DU3L, where would-be shooters square off in armed combat, and his mysterious cousin Destiny, whereabouts unknown, whose own violence brought the massacre to an end. When the Woolsacks’ legacy is co-opted by Troy Yarbrough, a far-right politician leading a movement to turn the Florida panhandle into a white Christian ethnostate, Rodney bursts into Rally’s life, taking him on a journey into the wild heart of West Florida, where they join forces with a woman known only as the Governor—part prophet, part machine, with her own blazing vision for West Florida. Soon Rally will learn what West Florida means to the Woolsacks, and the lengths they will go to protect it, all while he falls for the machine-gun-toting, ATV-riding girl next door. An explosive, genre-redefining take on family, violence, and the costs of preserving a legacy in a sun-soaked world of megachurch magnates, suburban guerillas, and robotic warriors, The Great State of West Florida is also the tender coming-of-age story of a young man caught in the wheels of something bigger than he knows. Praise for The Great State of West Florida : The Gabber Book Club August pick “The lore is deep here, but the novel is better for it. A wild romp of a read.”— Chaney Hill, Southern Review of Books “Wascom’s first three novels, The Blood of Heaven , Secessia , and The New Inheritors , followed the trail of the Woolsack family of West Florida from just after the American Revolution to the turn of the 20th century—a trail marked by material success and bloody violence. They’re gorgeously written, ruthless books, evoking predecessors like William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews, and capturing the darkest side of the Sunshine State’s past. With The Great State of West Florida , Wascom follows the Woolsack family into the future, although just barely—most of the book is set a couple of years from now in the Florida Panhandle . . . How it plays out is a pedal-to-the-metal wild ride, outlandish yet uncomfortably plausible. Wascom makes the satire work by always playing it just beyond the edge of reality, and here in Florida that edge is pretty far out there.”— Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times “Chock full of rough characters, colorful language and keen insight into the violent machinations that shape much of society . . . The novel examines ever-widening social rifts in the South and imagines just how vast those fissures can become. Spoiler: violence, violence and more violence. But against that backdrop we find community and love . . . This novel is a literary fictional take on Manga, a new Southern Revisionist Western and something else unclassifiable entirely.”— Jason Christian, Southern Review of Books “Secessionist states? Civil war? Apocalyptic times? Trailer park massacres? Ring a few bells? In his disorienting, dizzying, compelling new novel, Kent Wascom rings those bells and brings to life an assortment of contemporary nightmares along the way . . . The story he creates in The Great State of West Florida reads like Metallica, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath meet J. D. Salinger, Anthony Burgess, and Quentin Tarantino . . . Wascom’s writing is always sharp, clear, and inventive. His characters come across as both familiar and startling. The broken bones and bullet holes that punctuate his narrative make for a wildly violent but eerily recognizable landscape. The tune of this punk rock War and Peace will not be for everyone, but any reader who pays attention to the lyrics that come through the sounds of bullets and crushed cartilage will hear something worth remembering . . . Wascom’s vision, like a Flannery O’Connor story, comes like a bullet to the reader’s heart.”— New York Journal of Books “Wascom is a West Florida romantic and realist, and the greatest chronicler of the region . . . The Great State of West Florida breaks from a telling of the past, while also illuminating violence’s beginnings. Wascom adds layers to the narrative history he’s built over the past decade, complicating ou