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...