Lee Durkee

Rides of the Midway

A hilarious, poignant, and twisted novel by a writer best described as a young, southern John Irving.

Heartbreaking and wickedly funny, Rides of the Midway whirls through the manic Mississippi nights of haunted teenager Noel Weatherspoon.

Noel Weatherspoon is many things: an unwitting clairvoyant, an extreme asthma sufferer, a ghost-seeing insomniac, an endearing dopehead, a wanna-be erotic photographer, a would-be baseball star, a regretful vandal, a lamentable virgin, and a suspected, somnambulant mercy-killer. Spinning in ten directions at once by his passions and missteps, he finds himself haunted by ghosts both real and imagined: by the specter of the boy he knocked into oblivion while sliding home in a Little League game, and by the spirit of his father, a POW who disappeared in Vietnam.

Set in the Christ-haunted landscape of Mississippi during the frenzied 1970s, the surely damned Noel must navigate all manner of bible thumpers, from gossiping Baptists, Pentecostal cousins, born-again Christians, and jaw-set Methodists to a stepfather who bears an uncanny resemblance to Billy Graham. Noel, who prefers The Exorcist to Ecclesiastes, and whose own ecstatic visions are more demented than divine, has his faith tested and his soul fraught at every turn.

As he whirls into romantic entanglements, the discovery of a hidden cache of Polaroids leaves him with an unwitting appetite for the female form, after which, camera in hand, he embarks on his lifelong quest to be an erotic photographer. But when he meets an older woman who holds some of the answers he's been looking for, she leaves him with a whole new set of questions.

Lyrical and touching, and filled with laugh-out-loud scenes, Rides of the Midway is a brilliantly inventive story about a young man whose life spins completely out of control. Lee Durkee proves he is a formidable new talent in contemporary fiction.

"This book gave me the heebie-jeebies, and almost nothing gives me the heebie-jeebies these days. It's a damn good novel."—Pinckney Benedict

"A work of manic brilliance that depicts a gorgeous inverse of America you haven't seen in print before, where all our wild energy has imploded on itself: our hopes have become humiliations, our longing addictions, and our dreams liabilities. Lee Durkee is a writer who knows the dark heart of America and stares it down with equal parts love and revulsion. Darkly comic, perverse, and lyrical, Rides of the Midway shows us what happens when the much-touted American dream finds no horizon: it grounds itself with fierce resolve." —George Saunders

"A wonderful debut. . . . Lee Durkee is a marvelously inventive writer, both moving and comic in turn, who packs surprises on every page and writes sentences that any other writer will envy. Rides of the Midway was a joy to read."—Stephen Dobyns

"Rides of the Midway is a memorable first novel, its darkness lit by wisdom. Lee Durkee has written a haunting and haunted story of a pair of small town Mississippi teenagers almost destroyed by guilt, struggling toward grace."—Shelby Hearon

"What an exciting new voice we have in Lee Durkee! Every sentence in Rides of the Midway bristles with joy and danger and surprise. Noel Weatherspoon still haunts my thoughts, long after I put down this book."—Lewis Nordan

"A marvelously rich book—thick with life, dark-humored as a night in the funhouse, smart as the guy who guesses your weight. Mr. Durkee has himself a small masterpiece here . . . the story with the top down, fiction going hard and headlong in the direction of beauty, a ride you'd be silly to forgo."—Lee K. Abbott

"A beautiful whirlwind of a novel, one whose sentences make you want to uncork some wine and toast Lee Durkee. Good French stuff, I might add, for this debut is that impressive."—Dale Ray Phillips

"Riveting. . . . Powerfully and honestly, Lee Durkee gives us the real and the surreal . . . [he] restores our innocence and then makes us feel the enormity of its loss again. It's a hell of a performance."—Donald Hays