The Wedding on Big Bone Hill explores some underpinnings-and seamy undersides-of modern American life in its two short novels.

In the title piece, Jack hits the road in his RV on a quest for Paradise, USA, which he finds in a bucolic Kansas park where he takes a workamper job. But this Eden turns out to be almost as tricky as the original, for the head ranger, soon to marry Donna atop Big Bone Hill, allows his deputy-her father, Percy-free rein over the park.

Percy’s convinced that everybody tries to get away with something, but that anyone allowed to get away with anything will try to get away with more, and he (if he alone) can see where that leads-he being the poster child for getting away with nothing. So when a boy goes missing the weekend The Wedding on Big Bone Hill is to take place, Percy takes on the lonely task of meting out justice-threatening tragedy in an otherwise ruefully funny celebration of an American microcosm.

In Junkie, Indiana Cordelia falls for Jordan, the older teenager who lives across the way in Shady Acres Trailer Park. But Jordan’s a junkie, like his cousin Adam, their mothers, aunts and a dismaying proportion of the town of Chuterville. After Cordelia witnesses the cousins committing a crime, they try to shut her up-forcing her to take the only decisive action she can in this bleakest of tales torn from the chronicles of the Midwest’s opioid epidemic.