DAYTONA TEDDY RIGGS

In 1996 Gulf Coast Texas, a one-time high school football star sets his sights on winning the regional World’s Strongest Man contest, with disastrous results.

Teddy Riggs prefers to be known as Daytona: “Fastest on the field. Fastest on the road.” Third-generation scion of an oil family, he’s been cut off from his trust fund by his parents and lives with Granny, who will cook him a dozen eggs to slake the appetite he’s developed on “the juice.” His “roid rage” shows up in present-day fights at his old athletic fields, as well as flashbacks to incidents that have him banned from multiple Corpus Christi gyms. Teddy is in a downward spiral (think classic losers from Thelma and Louise to Richard Russo’s Hank Devereaux Jr.), but author Buxton allows him to develop as he falls, including a sexual awakening and nascent sense of purpose. These flickers of growth will keep readers rooting for Teddy even when he’s in the midst of irrational actions and complicated manipulations of friends and family members, trying every way he can to shake people down for money—often to fuel his huge fast-food orders; he eats multiple pizzas in a sitting and assures everyone this is misery. After he has a few encounters with a woman named Tammy, he convinces her to head to Houston so he can attend a seminar given by Pat Dupree, a life coaching guru who says “life is constantly testing our commitment to what we say we want.” Even after he’s received some of his idol’s spurious advice, Teddy can’t stop the wild, disastrous ride he’s on. At one point he lands in prison, convincing his sister, Pam, a veterinarian, to pay his bail. Teddy’s fate is all there in Pam’s reaction to his offer to pay her back in personal training sessions: “She smiles and starts laughing, laughing like crazy and shaking her head.” She drives off, leaving Daytona Teddy Riggs speeding toward his unhinged future.

Part satire, part wake-up call, and all openhearted perspective, this debut promises excellent work to come from its author.