Fat Guy in Prison

Fat Guy. FG. Fats. Fatty. Call him what you want-it won't help you once you've made his list. Joe's Vietnam-ravaged father made the list the night his 6-year-old daughter died, snapping Joe's young limbs for not watching. In prison for exacting justice, Fatty's list grows: brutish guards, and power-mad cons who don't know they're on it - or who keeps knocking them off. Reunited with Joe, a one-punch artist whose alcoholism and drug addiction also lands him in stir, Fat Guy wages a war of pure fat against pure evil in the form of Hank Stank, Eduardo, and the witless Number Two. Fat Guy's not an alchy, and at over 300 pounds of hairless flab he's not exactly anonymous. Yet his method of killing leaves no trace. Perhaps that's what happens when you kill with your fat. Jam packed with big personalities struggling for redemption like Irish Mark, Sweaty, Skunk and Felix the Junkie, Fat Guy in Prison shows goodness at its best: a tight-lipped 300-pounder squished up against the bad. Captivating and crazy, Fat Guy in Prison is a lyrical and brutal war for one prison's soul. "Excellent. Brilliantly raw-boned and immediate from the first page."

Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing in the Same Car. "If you were to take Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, put him in prison, and make him even fatter, then you'd have the farrago of tragic joy that is Doug Barney's novel. It was nothing less than harrowingly funny - and I finished it wanting more."

Gary S. Kadet, author of The Ogre Life.