A DICTATORSHIP RISING

In The Heathen Paradise, Phillip Mink conjures a dystopian future in which an economic crisis is driving the constitutional order over a cliff. Racism is resurgent, and a squad of Bolsheviks is trying to seize economic power. As the nation plummets into the maelstrom, Phelix Blackstock, an aging relic from the Jim Crow era, sets in motion a plot 20 years in the making. He will install his puppet son, Senator Preston Blackstock, in the Presidency to carry out an agenda based on the worst excesses of the Right and Left. The only person who has an inkling of the plan is Clyde Savage, a Choctaw Indian sheriff in tiny Rose, Mississippi, Phelix’s home town. But for Clyde to stop the plot, he has to survive in a place that had spawned multitudes of world-class bigots.

 

The narrative begins when eight-year-old Thomas Fleming finds a baby’s corpse in a massive forest outside Rose. As Clyde investigates the death, he’s convinced he can pin it on Wallace Slade, a ruthless thug Clyde has been trying to put away for years.

 

His investigation leads him to Senator Blackstock and his wife Vivien, Slade’s friend and the most amoral creature Clyde has ever met. Her daughter Scarlett, Clyde’s classmate from years before, is now a wrecked woman thanks to Vivien’s abuse. Scarlett knows her mother is planning something horrific because she is happy, and only mayhem pleases her. Scarlett tells Clyde a story of rape and degradation twenty years ago, the same era when Clyde’s father was murdered. She’s convinced the events of that time are connected to whatever Vivien and Slade planning now.

 

But Slade and Vivien, Clyde discovers, are mere underlings. Phelix is the boss. Once a brilliant lawyer who defended the State of Mississippi in desegregation cases, Phelix is now completely absorbed in his perverse belief systems, and he dreams of the day he can slaughter non-believers.

 

When the President returns to Rose for a funeral, Phelix’s plan unfurls with a ferocious chase through the great Tecumseh County Forest. Clyde has learned the details of the plot only moments before the assassination is to occur, and to stop it he will likely die. He does not hesitate even for an instant.

 

The Heathen Paradise is a riveting thriller that resonates with the toxic politics of our time.

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