Overview

In 1982, a sixteen-year-old in Lincoln, Nebraska wrote eight episodes of a television series called The Westborough Crusaders, filmed two of them, and won a Cable ACE award. The actor who played Crew later committed suicide. These novels are, in part, an attempt to finish what they started together. Book One dramatizes the year before the cameras arrive. It is the summer before freshman year in a Midwestern city that runs on football, routine, and the assumption that things will stay the way they are. Ares Taler is a tight end who catches everything his best friend Keithe throws, until Keithe discovers a girl at the shore and the friendship begins its quiet, undramatic end. Crew Smith arrives from Florida in orange overalls and red sunglasses, carrying a chrome razor he does not need and a talent for burning through friendships that will, for the first time, fail to expire. Stan Harrison lives in the Taler guest room, bowls with Ares's sister Julie on Tuesday nights, and has not yet been offered his first beer by the senior who will dismantle him. Bergie Bergman endures bullying at Northside, transfers to Westborough, and waits for his mother to say the sentence that will change everything. In the journalism room at the end of a dead-end corridor, a teacher named Canterbilly winds a Swiss grandfather clock every Sunday, eats donuts, and reads student writing samples with the attention of a man who has nothing else to attend to. In the heating ducts above the Taler house, Ares's brother Puck conducts private surveillance of the family while concealing headaches that will become a diagnosis that will reorganize the household around a disease nobody is willing to name. Eight lives. One school year. Twenty-five chapters of accumulation, friction, and the slow gathering of forces that will detonate when the cameras arrive in sophomore year. The Westborough Crusaders is a trilogy structured as Before, During, and After. This is Before. The feelings are not fictional.

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