THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS

Kevin Keating is one of those writers whom we all set our course and hope to find: a novelist writing perfectly-honed, deeply intense, intelligent, complex and emotionally moving fiction that is also so gripping that readers will want to ignore all else until finishing his latest. In Kevin’s case, he is doing so from the dark center of the American heartland.

THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS is set in a decaying Midwestern town, with its goings-on and entire atmosphere dominated and somehow charged by one Jesuit prep school and that school’s students, parents, faculty, and alumni. From the opening chapter and its story of the doomed quarterback, Frank McSweeney, for whom prayers prove not enough, to the end, wherein the school’s former headmaster is betrayed by his peers in the worst way possible, we see people and their oddness and ambitions laid out before us in prose that is precise and free of cliché, and with stories that are unpredictable and yet hit with the power of truth. The Natural Order of Things , comprised of 15 interconnected stories, is properly thought of as a novel in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven ? but with a gothic sensibility. The novel concerns the adventures and exploits of a small group of students, teachers, employees, and priests at a Jesuit prep school in a dying industrial city. Its stories harbor star quarterbacks who sabotage important games, the head coach with a gambling addiction wagering on his own team, an elderly priest suffering from acute memory loss who dabbles in heretical beliefs, and others who swim against the tides of society's proscribed roles. This title is a finalist in the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction category of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Winners to be announced April 19, 2013 in Los Angeles, CA. KEVIN P. KEATING's fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including The Mad Hatter’s Review, The Avatar Review, The Spillway Review, The North Coast Review, The Fifth Street Review, The Midwest Literary Review, The Bicycle Review, Juked, Perigee, Exquisite Corpse, Inertia, Identity Theory, and many others.