The air blowing into the open window was warm enough to warn of the heat to come but not yet unpleasant. The wipers smeared their way back and forth across the greasy windshield, trying to erase the light drizzle that had begun to fall. The homeless were already busy making their way through the late summer fog, eyes wild and blazing. A group of three staggered like the undead toward the Belvedere 7-Eleven that was behind my old house on Pine. It was almost six o’clock — when they started selling booze again. We rolled our small convoy urgently past them and got it on further downtown, supercans rattling around in the steel cage that formed the bed of the stake body truck, the bags inside the cans whipping recklessly in the wind.

So begins a new novel by Clay Blancett, entitled The Avenue of Champions. You can read the rest of the first chapter on his blog, fig.1-Worm Drive.

The whole thing just became available on Amazon. Here’s the summary from there:

A recently divorced single father struggles to maintain his identity and integrity working for the City of Richmond’s Solid Waste pick up. The protagonist negotiates the environments of manual labor and family life while trying to avoid the costs of his alcoholism on his family, his past, and his sense of himself. Nearly brought to suicide, the protagonist survives by discovering the basic beauty of the humanity he shares with the people he works with.

I have posted before about authors before who include Oregon Hill in their stories. Of course I have followed Howard Owen, with his detective thriller, Oregon Hill, but don’t forget the post-plague Harbor On The Hill. I would love to post more.