Lately, my good luck has been our collective bad luck.
I don’t try to be topical, ride movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter, or mine crises such as COVID-19. The drafting of my Bad Axe County novels has come well ahead of these cultural-watershed moments. And each time, immersed in my process, I’ve been haunted by a sinking feeling: I’ve watched this for years, I’ve done the research, this is real as rain, but nobody’s going to believe it.
Then it happens.
Through most of 2018–19, triggered by the sex crimes of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffery Epstein, #MeToo explodes and women are telling their stories. Rocks are overturned. Light shines. Abusers scuttle. Sexual abuse is suddenly the air we breathe – or rather, we’re no longer denying it. Suddenly – or should I say “suddenly” – there is nothing over-the-top occurring in Bad Axe County (2019) when Sheriff Heidi Kick lifts a rock in her rural Wisconsin community and exposes a sex-trafficking ring supplying women to the fracking fields of North Dakota.
In summer of 2020, a Minnesota cop goes too far even for middle-class white America, and suddenly there is no denying the virulent racism in our culture. When confederate imagery is featured by boogaloos attacking the U.S. Capitol, we see the intersection of racist-populist energies, and we understand there are organized efforts to start a race war in the United States. Suddenly, it’s not far-fetched that in Dead Man Dancing (2020) a guy bullies down Main Street with a confederate flag unfurling behind his pickup – and that this becomes the thread Sheriff Kick pulls to unravel the violence wrought by local white supremacists training for the fight.
The news in spring of 2021 is appropriately more subtle, because on this topic we humans are like frogs in a pot of water rising toward a boil. Any number of things should have chased us out of the climate-change pot by now. Cue this this story from Japan: as millions party under cherry blossoms, some killjoy announces that this is the earliest bloom since record-keeping began 1,209 years ago.
But wait! The news has not been subtle on this topic? Oh, right: a pandemic caused by horizontal transfer – non-human to human – of a deadly virus for which we have little defense, an existential threat accelerating alongside climate change that experts have warned about while we party on. Suddenly the third in my series, Bad Moon Rising (June, 2021), is no longer speculative when a cognate of the mad-cow prion crosses into the human brain and one bad frog leaps screaming out of the pot.
I referred to “my good luck,” but I am more like a helpless sponge for the spirit of the times. I also referred to “our bad luck,” but there is no luck involved. These are messy and intractable conflicts that we have created for ourselves. It should be expected that forces this powerful would drive the kinds of local, face-to-face crimes that Sheriff Kick wrestles with and solves in Bad Axe County, Dead Man Dancing, and Bad Moon Rising.
Watch out for the next novel in the series, They Shoot Horses, in 2022. And duck for cover, I guess.
John Galligan is the author of seven novels, including the Bad Axe County Series and the Fly Fishing Mysteries. He lives and teaches writing in Madison, Wisconsin.
