Somebody Down There Likes Me

Honey and Fax Gulch, billionaire owners of the Gulch empire, summon their adult children to their Connecticut mansion to announce that their empire is coming to an end. Within the week, the FBI will raid their properties, seize their assets and arrest the parents, leaving the children with nothing. The family are not fighting this – with decades of criminal business proceedings behind them, they know this ending is inevitable.

If the Gulch family have experienced the American dream, they must now face the American nightmare – riches-to-rags, public humiliation, jail time, ruin: a bureaucratic murder of Gatsby, this time not by gun but by reputation. And a nightmare it is – Robert Lukins methodically dissects the unravelling of each family member. Honey Gulch – matriarch, genius – cannot drop her cold façade, and, instead, becomes it; Fax Gulch descends further into his madness and severs his last remaining connections to the world. Of the children, Lincoln Gulch has remained working for his parents, and becomes more power hungry as he loses the only claim to power he ever had, while Kick Gulch returns to Belle Haven and fails again to disavow the family of which she has never managed to let go. Kick seems to trade one ghost town for another; the ultra-rich community of Belle Haven is no more alive than a ghost town, including the one from which she has just arrived, and her life is still populated by ghosts of the past. Amid these ruins, what can remain? What is left when wealth, family and consciousness crumble away?

Lukins anatomises wealth, privilege and empire as mercilessly as a dismembering. With the collapse of the American family comes the collapse of the American mind. By turns humorous and tense, comic and tragic, Lukins carves out a new Americana that will leave all trembling in its wake.