Kos Kostmayer’s novel Fargo Burns takes its title from the main character, a 32-year-old, Mississippi-born New Yorker who makes two serious mistakes and spends the rest of his life trying to undo the damage. Mistake #1: Fargo goes mad, violently so, and turns into a dog. He finds himself in a mental hospital under the care of a psychiatrist (whom he believes to be Virginia Woolf). Released from the hospital, Fargo makes mistake #2: he begins an affair with a professional killer’s girlfriend.

The story, which moves back and forth between the Mississippi Delta and New York City, unfolds at the height of the war against Vietnam, a time of turmoil, revolutionary change and violent upheaval in American society. Kostmayer, an award-winning playwright and poet, brings concision and beauty to his exploration of the dread that lies at the heart of so much American violence.

Fargo Burns commits an act of violence and then struggles to atone. The struggle is fierce, and it touches on race, religion, sex, history and politics as it charts an unpredictable course that begins in a scene of madness and ends with a knife fight in a dark New York City cathedral. Between the madness he unleashes the violence he confronts, Fargo Burns finally learns what it means to be a man instead of a dog. It is a lesson that comes at a very high price.