Frank's Bloody Books - by Mack Green (Paperback)

About the Book

The story of Jack "Half-Pint" Crowe, traumatized by his experiences in war, who by the guidance of a saintly corpsman, sets off in search of meaning in his life.

Book Synopsis

Cruelty and abuse from his Southern past follow Jack "Half-Pint" Crowe into the Vietnam War. Two tours of combat inflict physical wounds and moral damage, but they also deliver the ministrations of a Navy corpsman named Frank-a holy being who reads mysterious books and befriends Jack, coaxing him inward toward his own wholeness. When Frank is killed in battle, an anguished Half-Pint removes three blood-stained books from Frank's shredded pack.

Those books and his vow of nonviolence carry the Marine home to the swampy borderland of Louisiana and Arkansas. In that summer of return, Half-Pint plunges back into the atmosphere of hell he had longed to escape for good. Hunted by the fanatical Calvin Whitehead after offering help to his wife and son, his vow of nonviolence is challenged in the murky swamplands of the Southern grotesque. He takes refuge in his new oil rig coworkers, a misfit cast of no-gooders on the verge of insanity brought on by the harsh conditions of their job and the undying meaninglessness of a life spent cheating death amid the pulse of true American blue collar work life.

It is through these folds we see the illumination of Half-Pint's evermoving quest for truth and meaning. Guided by Frank's bloodstained books, Half-Pint must shred all he knows to find the thing missing in all of us.

Review Quotes

"An unflinching, raw, and ultimately gorgeous tale."

- Laura Pritchett, winner of the PEN USA Award in Fiction

"A moving novel of heart and depth."

- Barbara Richardson, author of Tributary, winner of Utah Book Award

"Green gives us a layered portrait of the life of a rural working-class southern man, scarred by his fighting in the Vietnam war. In this time of forever wars and festering economic inequality, Green's book does what good fiction can do - shine a light on the meaning and psychology of lives unknown by many."

- Jay Youngdahl, veteran, and author of Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty: Navajos, Hozho, and Track Work

"Jack 'Half-Pint' Crowe, reeling from two tours in Vietnam and the loss of his friend on the battlefield, returns to the oil fields and swamps of Louisiana determined to practice nonviolence in a world where a simple act of kindness might get him killed. Mack Green is a skilled storyteller who never flinches in his depiction of the roughnecks and holy men that populate this story, and who never fails to show grace even when describing men's darkest impulses. Frank's Bloody Books is a gripping tale of resilience and redemption."

- Tiffany Tyson, author of The Past is Never

"As a fellow Vietnam veteran, Mack Green's Frank's Bloody Books pulled me back to my own deeply-etched memories surrounding that misbegotten war. Green's Jack 'Half-Pint' Crowe doesn't take one step wrong in recreating how so many young men have had to make peace with their wartime experiences as they try to slide back into some semblance of a normal life 'back in the world, ' as we would say back then. I was fully absorbed."

- Dick Price, LA Progressive