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Squire Babcock has taken a long and fascinating path to becoming a novelist. He grew up in a dysfunctional home in well-to-do suburban Louisville and hit bottom in 1972 when he was arrested and jailed for possession of heroin. In the ensuing years, as he struggled to rise from the ashes of his disintegrated family, he worked as a ballroom dance instructor, farm hand, weigh-man in a cotton gin, hunting guide, pool table repair mechanic, small business owner, carpenter, free-lance journalist and blues drummer.
His call to writing and teaching found wings relatively late in life when, at the age of 30, he sold his Nashville pool table business and registered as a freshman English major at the University of Massachusetts. After graduating with his B.A., he taught English at a Massachusetts boarding school for three years before returning to UMass for his MFA.
In 1996 Kentucky Governor Brereton Jones pardoned Babcock’s heroin conviction. He currently is Associate Professor of English at Murray State University, where he has taught English and creative writing for 16 years and heads up the Low-Residency MFA Program in creative writing.
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In 1970s America, two characters struggle for ultimate control ... one for a life he can scarcely imagine, the other for the only life he has ever known.
During the six months following the fiery Fourth of July death of his parents in a car wreck (for which he is blamed), the protagonist, a nearly friendless loner, must learn to manage both his family business (the Turtle Playing Card Company) and his father's vast hunting preserve in Gaheena, Arkansas. All the while, he is forced to fight charges that he killed his parents.
Infused with its wealth of symbolism, Babcock's novel is a compelling tale that contrasts normalcy, whatever that may be, against paradoxes revealed in nature and humanity. From the opening chapter to the final deal of the cards, The King of Gaheena is an odyssey of love, lust, seduction and confusion ... shot through with stout doses of confrontation and tragedy, the hunter and the hunted, violence and wonder, longing and learning, recovery and redemption.
Buy The King of Gaheena at Amazon.com
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