Slim and the Beast - Samul L. Barrantes

Sergeant Chandler Dykes is obsessed with two misfits: Slim, a former cadet with a brutal neck scar, and his best friend, The Beast, a college basketball star with a proclivity for cooking. When Slim and The Beast take shelter from a hurricane in a country bar, they learn that Sgt. Dykes has been haunting the place, raving about opossums, bathtub whiskey, and his estranged cadet, Slim. As the bartender swaps tales with Slim and The Beast in hopes of understanding Dykes' obsession, the two young men are forced to confront their own troubled pasts. With dexterous prose and unflinching humor, wrapped in the rich dialect of the South, the conversations at Lockart's traverse art, love, sex, and philosophy, warily observing the savage storm and the ghosts it seems to be dredging up. A remarkable first novel that recalls the liveliness of Wells Tower and packs the punch of Denis Johnson, Slim and The Beast lays out what's at stake in a friendship, recalling the decisions we make on the edge of adulthood that define the person we become.