When we meet Odom Shiloh, the middle-aged assistant to the assistant
football coach at Frothmouth High School in the fictional town of
Frothmouth, Arkansas (pop. 327), he’s enlisted his friend (an art
historian turned private investigator named Blakey Flake) to find
Odom’s 36-year-old sister, Bridget (aka, for 36 years, “Birdshit”).
Bridget writes poetry. Bridget’s been dealt a horrible hand by a former
boyfriend. And she’s run off with an 18-year-old Frothmouth High
football star who happens to be black. (Odom and Bridget: They’re
white.)

Maybe the couple have made it down to Louisiana. Or maybe they’re in
Little Rock. Or Fayetteville. Or as far as Kansas City. Odom would like
to know, but he’s sort of on the lam too: from himself perhaps and
definitely after he hightailed it out of Memphis, where Odom
absent-mindedly collided with a cyclist who was traveling at top speed
during the “Memphis 300” bike race. The accident has landed that
cyclist in the hospital, and the accident put Odom at full speed back
on I-40 and heading home to Frothmouth.

So, no wonder, as Odom himself admits, he’s lately “been out of
sorts.” (His second marriage? It’s on the rocks, though Odom still has
affection for Briana [aka Bree] and his step-son, Sparkman [aka Spark,
aka Sparky].) As Odom describes it, he’s been having “these fits” where
he “zones out” and loses track of what’s happening around him. Warning
to Odom, however, and to readers: Based on what Odom learns at the end
of Drag the Darkness Down (No Record Press), by Matt Baker, why
shouldn’t he be subject to fits? The dark revelations at the novel’s
conclusion are pitch-black and no fun in what is, in the main, a
winning, comic novel. Absurdist stuff? True, but just barely if you
know backroads America and pop-culture America.

Baker knows both the backroads and pop culture in this, his debut
novel. But his stories, essays, and book reviews have already appeared
in literary magazines and newspapers. (His story “Survivors” won an
honorable mention in 2008 in Memphis magazine’s annual fiction
contest.) Not bad for a writer who seriously started writing only six
years ago and writes when he isn’t serving as associate publisher at
the Oxford American magazine.

Baker was born in Indiana, grew up in suburban Kansas City, and
graduated from the University of Arkansas. Today, he lives in Little
Rock, but somewhere between then and now, he trained in comedy at
Second City in Chicago and earned a license to operate a forklift in a
Styrofoam cup factory. Neither of which explains the novel Baker’s
working on now: a story about Norbert Fingersol, a messiah on a
mission: to travel to Lebanon (Kansas) to find a buried spaceship. It’s
a novel, Baker said in an e-mail, that’s nearing completion. (“As
opposed to [my] staring at it for weeks and months, waiting for the
words and sentences to magically edit themselves.”)

“I think I’ve always had a comic sensibility,” Baker also said. “And
I’ve always wanted to be a writer.” To which he added: “the standard
answer.”

The unstandard answer to why the name “Odom Shiloh”: As Baker
described it on the Oxford American’s website: “The narrator’s
name … I stole from two signs. There’s an exit off I-40 I used to
take and when you come off the exit there were two large signs
advertising Odom Manufactured Homes and another business,
Shiloh-something. … I thought, what a great name, Odom Shiloh.”

And what a memorable character upon which to hang a first novel as
confident as Drag the Darkness Down.