This Side of Jordan

This Side of Jordan, Monte Schulz's literary prose novel, is told in the voice of a lost generation hurtling toward the Great Depression. In the spring of 1929, 19-year-old consumptive farm boy Alvin Pendergast finds an invitation for a late-night slice of pie is too seductive to pass up and before he knows it, he crosses the Mississippi River and finds himself working for a slick con artist named Chester Burke, formerly a gangster out of Chicago. With Alvin in tow, Chester embarks on a series of bank robberies and senseless murders through the small towns of America's middle border, peopled with vivid, outsized literary characters. Fortunately, Alvin finds another companion on his journey, a lonely, eccentric, and grandiloquent dwarf named Rascal. At first too ill to flee, too morally weak to object, Alvin must make a decision: stick with Chester, who would surely kill him at the slightest hint of betrayal, or muster the courage to stake his life on Rascal's clever plan (which includes a circus) to save them both. What Alvin discovers about the meaning of home offers a solution to escape and freedom.