The Dart League King

2009 Morning News Tournament of Books Nominee

An intriguing tale of darts, drugs, and death. Russell Harmon is the self-proclaimed king of his small-town Idaho dart league, but all is not well in his kingdom. In the midst of the league championship match, the intertwining stories of those gathered at the 411 club reveal Russell's dangerous debt to a local drug dealer, his teammate Tristan Mackey's involvement in the disappearance of a college student, and a love triangle with a former classmate. The characters in Keith Lee Morris's second novel struggle to find the balance between accepting and controlling their destinies, but their fates are threaded together more closely together than they realize.

"[A] sensitive, cleverly constructed novel of small-town life and big-league dreams....[A] subtle, near flawless portrait of the unique ways that small-town life can both nurture and suffocate its residents." Booklist (Starred Review)

"Keith Morris is one of my favorite fiction writers and The Dart League King is his best book yet. In his Idaho you can see the rest of America, in his Idahoans the rest of us Americans: funny, grave, profane, tender, violent, full of longing for something and someone we don't really deserve and will do almost anything to get anyway. I am in awe of this novel, this novelist." Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

"What a testament it is to a splendid novelist's powers to pitch-perfectly create a small-town dart league and in doing so not only illuminate the zeitgeist but some universal truths to boot. The Dart League King is a nine-darter of a novel and Keith Lee Morris is a writer whose books I have promised myself never to skip." Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"Sign me up as a member of the Keith Lee Morris fan club. His characters are as real, fallible, and surprising as anyone I've ever met, and his novel has all the textures of real life: precarious, tender, and utterly engrossing." Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners

"I would give my throwing arm to write a novel as tightly woven and fast and suspenseful and ultimately heartbreaking as The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris has created an edgy, perfect masterpiece, with more damn life in it than 99% of the books I've ever read. People will be reading and talking about The Dart League King for years to come. I'd wager a twelve-pack on it." Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff

"Morris is heir to the Richard Ford of Rock Springs; he has that rare gift of writing truthfully about people we knowand care for." William Giraldi, The Believer

"The Dart League King is no lullaby. This chilling novel pulled me right in and through. I see it as a mystery — told in reverse — a who-will-do-it as opposed to a whodunit, and Morris is perfectly suited to this task." Julianna Baggott, author of The Madam and Which Brings Me to You

"A dark and deeply involving novel with a haunting moment on just about every page. Suspenseful, gritty, great." McSweeney's

"South Carolina-based writer/English professor Keith lee Morris gets Americans — especially the small town variety. The fiction writer's latest book, a tight weave of stories centered on an ill-fated Idaho bar league dart championship, is full of enraged dealers, do-good mothers and drifting small town souls. But it is Morris' knack for stark, funny dialogue and left-field plot twists that turn his work from caricature to a beautiful and brutal dissection of the drinking buddies you thought you knew." Kelly Clarke, Willamette Week

"It is as compelling a novel as I've read all year. Morris, like Martin Amis in the 1989 novel London Fields, uses darts as a metaphor for striving by an inarticulate male protagonist, but also as a plot device to bring together five excruciatingly credible characters in a neatly crafted work bound for critical acclaim." Matt Davis, The Portland Mercury

Keith Lee Morris is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Clemson University. His short stories have been published in Tin House, A Public Space, Southern Review, Ninth Letter, StoryQuarterly, New England Review, The Sun, and the Georgia Review, among other publications. The University of Nevada published his first two books, The Greyhound God(2003) and The Best Seats in the House (2004), and Tin House Books published his novel The Dart League King.