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.

Monte Schulz received his M.A. in American Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara. He published his first novel, Down by the River, in 1990, and spent the next twelve years writing a novel about the Jazz Age. His most recent novel, Metropolis, was published in 2022. His father is the late cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. He lives in Santa Barbara, CA.