Synopses & Reviews
Roy Scranton, controversial and critically-acclaimed, brings us a formally daring road trip into the heart of present-day America.
Suzie's seen it all, but now she's looking for something she lost: a sense of the future. So when the chance comes to work with a maverick video artist on his road movie about Donald Trump's America, she's pretty sure it's a bad idea but she signs up anyway, hoping for an outside shot at starting over.
A provocative, genderqueer, shapeshifting musical romp through the brain-eating nightmare of contemporary America, I Heart Oklahoma! is a book about art, guns, cars, American landscapes, and American history. This kaleidoscopic novel moves from our bleeding-edge present to a furious Faulknerian retelling of the Charlie Starkweather killings in the 1950s, capturing in its fragmented, mesmerizing form the violence at the heart of the American dream.
Review
"This novel of sex, violence, apathy, despair and art offers a bizarre, lightning-paced excursion through the present. For those readers on board with its wild, winding style, I ❤ Oklahoma! incisively parodies a weird time to be alive." Shelf Awareness
Review
"Simultaneously high flown and earthy, like a Platonic dialogue as written by Quentin Tarantino . . . this novel has big ambitions, a whipsawing imaginative energy, and, at its heart, the urgency and earnestness of a jeremiad."
Kirkus Reviews
Review
"I ❤ Oklahoma! invents new forms to capture the psychotic break that is present-day America. It's simultaneously a deconstructed road novel, pop culture avalanche, and historical serial killer story — a book about how the country's rotted myths have come home to roost. Boasting gleaming intelligence and batshit abandon, this is vital, unsettling, and urgent work."
Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters
Review
"There is something dangerous and dizzying about Scranton's writing, a violence of ideas. In I ❤ Oklahoma!, he turns his intellectual weapons on an elusive and necessary subject — the mystery that is America, and the extent to which even those people marinated fully in the mythology of this country can find themselves at a loss to understand it."
Omar El Akkad, author of American War
About the Author
Roy Scranton has been a dishwasher, truck driver, phone psychic, caregiver, door-to-door canvasser, telemarketer, soldier, short-order cook, fry cook, and journalist. He is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, the novel War Porn, and the essay collection We're Doomed. Now What? He has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among other honors, and holds a PhD in English from Princeton. He lives in Indiana, where he teaches at the University of Notre Dame.