What do most people do when their marriage suddenly falls apart?
For the protagonist of Black Gum, J. David Osborne’s slim and sinister 2015 novel, the answer is seemingly simple: He moves in with his friend Charlie, a mechanic in the tiny town of Comanche, Oklahoma, until his wife takes him back.
The book settles into a kind of slacker story of recreational drugs and blue collar doldrums until Charlie’s cousin Shane arrives with an odd request: He wants Charlie to tattoo his gums. When asked why he would want such a thing, Shane replies, “When I meet the devil, I want him to know I’m a friendly guy.”
A few pages later, Charlie admits his cousin is “a little off.”
That goes without saying, but just as “off” is the mystery that drives this unreservedly gritty and unapologetically masculine novel to its tantalizing, psychosexual conclusion.
Osborne became so enamored with the dynamic between Shane and the somewhat hapless narrator that he brought them back in 2017’s A Minor Storm, which picks up where Black Gum left off.
In A Minor Storm, we learn that Shane has been to jail for brutally killing a dog, a fact that somehow does nothing to diminish his unusual hold over the protagonist.
Is Shane a misunderstood young man who exaggerates rumors about himself to create a persona that’s larger than life? Or is he a violent psychopath who is one bad day away from ruining the lives of everyone in his path? The reader is never quite sure, which makes the weird tension between Shane and the narrator so irresistible. There’s a Sal Paradise/Dean Moriarity dynamic between the two characters. Similar to Kerouac’s friend and mentor Neal Cassady, whom he fictionalized for his novels, Shane is a charismatic and sexually adventurous felon. The difference is Shane has an enormous appetite for drugs and might actually be a shaman, albeit one who conducts bizarre rituals to hide firearms that have been used in crimes.
Also, I’m fairly certain Kerouac never wrote about Juggalos, who pop up with unnerving frequency in Osborne’s Black Gum novels.
Osborne, who is also the publisher of Broken River Books, is currently working on book three of the series, Tomahawk, and it’s a safe bet Shane will be back—with or without his sanity intact.