From a startling new voice in American fiction comes a dark, powerful novel about a tragic city and its inhabitants over the course of one Halloween weekend.

Set in a decaying Midwestern urban landscape, with its goings-on and entire atmosphere dominated and charged by one Jesuit prep school and its students, parents, faculty, and alumni, THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS is a window into the human condition. From the opening chapter and its story of the doomed quarterback, Frank McSweeney, aka The Minotaur, for whom prayers prove not enough, to the end, wherein the school's former headmaster is betrayed by his peers in the worst way possible, we see people and their oddness and ambitions laid out bare before us.

Review

Reading The Natural Order of Things is like holding a tattered masterpiece in your hands-- individually the pieces are their own small works of art but the true brilliance isn't realized until you fit them together.-- J.W. Schnarr, award-winning journalist and author of Alice & Dorothy

Here is Kevin Keating, rallying against that tired old complaint, "Where are the new American voices?" He writes with verve, knowing, and wit--an explorer of the thin but deep fissure between privileged Jesuit school boys and the scrape-by world that surrounds it.  Here, then, a wild exploration of the places and people that we wish we had the courage to begin. And now we can. Thanks to Kevin Keating's vision.

--Michael Garriga, author of The Book of Duels

Kevin P. Keating's The Natural Order of Things is a darkly brilliant, sometimes disturbing odyssey that lays bare the human condition.--Barry Goodrich, Cleveland Magazine. 

Keating toys with narrative chronology in this debut collection of interwoven stories that follows the lives of several reprobates who have descended into... Hades. At the center of an unnamed, ruined city of American industry thrives, tumorlike, a Jesuit high school and the Zanzibar Towers and Gardens, a flophouse where both students and alums slum it with prostitutes. In the opening story, Vigil, students have gathered at the Zanzibar to celebrate Halloween and the next day's big football game with kegs of beer they stole from a senile priest in the final story, Gehenna, that was delivered in the second story, Box, by the father of star quarterback Frank the Minotaur McSweeney. 'I'm counting on you. We all are,' says the Minotaur's father, but the day of the big game, as in all the connected stories, we find out just how big a letdown everyone in this life can be. Story by story, the collection circumnavigates suffering someone lights the homeless on fire at night; a merchant marine boxes up a man to ship him overseas; priests humiliate and shame their students, while one teacher loves them too much in a place where most of its inhabitants would rather gamble on a human life than try to save one. --Publishers Weekly

The Natural Order of Things is a dark and utterly compelling work with an unnervingly resonant vision of our present age. Excellent work by a fine young writer. --Robert Olen Butler, author of twelve novels and recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts

The Natural Order of Things is a work of gritty realism, populated with a cast of dark, flawed characters; Keating leads the reader through a labyrinth of stories with intelligent prose that unsettles. --Martin Rose, author and reviewer for Shroud Magazine

From the Author

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