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Michael Loyd Gray’s latest novel, Well Deserved shares the same fictional small Midwestern town with his second, December’s Children: Argus, Illinois. There was an Argus the All-Seeing in Greek mythology. Gray could very well be referencing “Argus of the hundred eyes.” We readers are willing witnesses, as well. His choice offers some pleasing continuities, such [...]
Argus, a small town in Illinois, is the home of four substantial characters whose lives are intertwined in this driven novel. I often find myself putting books into one group or another: character-driven or plot-driven. This book is an intriguing mix of both. Jesse, the small-time pot dealer, meets Raul, the just-off-the-docks Vietnam vet, both [...]
Michael Gray and I were out of place together as middle-aged enrollees in the MFA Fiction program at Western Michigan University in 1994. We were both writing short stories and drawing about $7000 per year from our teaching assistantships. And trading on ten years as a newspaper reporter, Michael was already drawing praise for his [...]
Michael Loyd Gray is the quintessential Midwestern writer. In Well Deserved, he presents us with Argus, Illinois, during a time that was a crucible for the American people: the 1970s. With a keen sense of both time and place, Gray bores deep down into each of his characters, shoving aside all extraneous elements until we [...]
We’ve been posting reviews and blurbs for Michael Loyd Gray’s Well Deserved for months, and it is now available for purchase. The folks of Argus, from the small-time dealer to the returning Vietnam vet, the townie grocery clerk and the new sheriff, all know what they want out of life, but the paths to their [...]
The infiltration of war into the daily lives of Americans, which was experienced during the Vietnam War is, in many ways, an ideal backdrop to explore the theme of justice. One could hardly avoid the bloody images of the conflict on their televisions. Nor could they escape the nightly body counts or the maiming of [...]
Michael Loyd Gray’s Well Deserved, an engaging story of four richly developed characters alternating between their points of view, is like a contemporary As I Lay Dying set to an early 1970s Rolling Stones soundtrack. It is that kind of bold, fun, engrossing chemistry that makes this novel, set in those tumultuous early 70s on [...]
Michael Loyd Gray’s clear straightforward prose is aimed directly at the revelation of character and unspools with the unmistakeable cadence of a storyteller. — Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed With Magellan
The following thread is a question-and-answer session with Michael Loyd Gray, whose novel, Well Deserved was a SOL Books Prose Series selection.
We are proud to announce that Well Deserved, by Michael Loyd Gray, was selected from among many worthy finalists for SOL Books Prose Series. A note on Well Deserved from our judges: The Vietnam War is ending, and America has an identity crisis. Everyone from the small town dope dealer to the returning vet, the townie grocery store clerk, [...]
