From author Squire Babcock comes the story of a pilgrimage into a deep and personal hell … and the journey back.

Where is Gaheena and who is its king?

Calvin Turtle, a 20-year-old rich kid from Louisville has used a difficult card game called Klondike as his life’s moral and providential touchstone. This version of Solitaire becomes the equivalent of a religion for Calvin, and within it he interprets symbolic guidance and pointed judgments of his character. An emotional paralysis that traps Calvin between the passivity of childhood and the decisiveness of manhood enables Klondike to produce defining motifs for his fate.

During the six months following the fiery Fourth of July death of his parents in a car wreck (for which he is blamed), the protagonist, a nearly friendless loner, must learn to manage both his family business (the Turtle Playing Card Company) and his father’s vast hunting preserve in Gaheena, Arkansas. All the while, he is forced to fight charges that he killed his parents.

Calvin’s internal grappling to unlock secrets of good, evil and indifference is made manifest with a literal struggle in a snaky quagmire as he battles to save himself from Gaheen’s “king,” a man name Karl who epitomizes two qualities that captivate Calvin’s fear and his admiration: terror and raw guiltless power.

A series of near-mythical scenes set in rural Arkansas swampland intersects with a string of cosmopolitan vignettes that Babcock moves the reader deftly through antithetical emotional landscapes that mirror the main character’s interior geography to reflect the very heart of a troubled American generation.

Initially at odds with his own magnetic poles, Calvin finds through his struggles that discordant forces ultimately come to rest at counterbalance. This causes Calvin, and the reader, to question the very notion of what it means to be “king.”

Infused with its wealth of symbolism, Babcock’s novel is a compelling tale that contrasts normalcy, whatever that may be, against paradoxes revealed in nature and humanity. From the opening chapter to the final deal of the cards, The King of Gaheena is an odyssey of love, lust, seduction and confusion … shot through with stout doses of confrontation and tragedy, the hunter and the hunted, violence and wonder, longing and learning, recovery and redemption.