A Little Blood and Dancing

Praise for A Little Blood and Dancing“Tyler Parker rhapsodizes a lush electric yarn of pop culture, basketball, neon-Jesus, and a simmering violence that is distinctly American. A Little Blood and Dancing is an everlasting gobstopper of a book!”—Lilly Wachowski, filmmaker, The Matrix“A Little Blood and Dancing is majestic and down-and-dirty and unstoppably funny and deeply sad. Tyler Parker is what they call in basketball a unicorn: he can do it all. I haven’t been this riveted, thrilled and broken open by a novel in a long time.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You and The Ask“Tyler Parker is one of the funniest writers alive, but A Little Blood and Dancing is also a book of deep and surprising tenderness. The best comic novelists know how to laugh at their characters without belittling them, and if this book is anything to go by, Parker has mastered this magic trick. His cast of screwball Oklahomans is so weird, vulnerable, gentle, violent, hopeful, and lost that it wouldn’t be out of place in real life. I loved it.”—Brian Phillips, author of Impossible Owls“The hardest task in literature is writing a truly funny book that makes you feel something, not just from the characters and what they do and say, but also from the sentences and how they feel new and full of energy. Only the most ambitious writers even try to do this and it’s remarkable and even edifying to see a writer like Tyler Parker do it all with such style.”—Jay Caspian Kang, author of The Dead Do Not Improve and The Loneliest Americans, staff writer at The New Yorker“Broke my heart and hurt my stomach. And I laughed the whole time. Can’t stop thinking about it.”—E.R. Fightmaster, Grey’s Anatomy, Shrill“The literary equivalent of smashing a beer sign with a pool cue. It’s a story that swirls with grit and glitter, God and pork butt, stale cigarettes and fresh wounds. Parker’s Oklahoma buzzes with tension, a fitting backdrop for his idiosyncratic personas and their bad, bad choices. But however gnarly, Parker has also graced his characters with a childlike tenderness. Meaning, you’ll be quickly smitten with these earnest weirdos as they love, lose, and grapple with the fallout from catastrophes of their own making. Bonus: It’s also damn funny.”—Ariel Dumas, Head Writer and Supervising Producer, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a hopeless book addict. A good book is one of life’s special pleasures. Tyler Parker has gone and written a great book and I will Copyright © 2023 by Tyler ParkerFirst edition published 2023All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.Strange Light is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in PublicationTitle: A little blood and dancing : a novel / Tyler Parker.Names: Parker, Tyler (Author), author.Identifiers: Canadiana 20220469253 | ISBN 9780771002090 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780771002106 (EPUB)Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.Classification: LCC PS3616.A7463 L58 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23Book design by Andrew Roberts, adapted for ebookCover art: (neon letters) Sebestyen Balint / Shutterstock; (asphalt) Artem Hvozdkov / Moment / Getty ImagesPublished by Strange Light,an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,a Penguin Random House Companywww.penguinrandomhouse.caa_prh_6.0_143817173_c0_r0 ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyrightDedicationEpigraphHot Purple Water GunShorthorns / Oxblood Gator Skin SeatsNaked as a Picked BirdVelvet Half-ZipCainraiserRitas at SilkhavenRhinestone StampedeSometimes Relationships Get IllMontage of a Prison TermDinner in a Gas StationDiannaReturn of the CowdudeStacey Dales / Laneishea CaufieldDoing the Bull Dance, Feeling the Flow, Working ItSand Bass / Celebration DayBlood Orange AwningJesus in Jeans / Pools (Hot Tubs)Bedlam in a Video StoreLet me Tell you that I Love you One More TimeAcknowledgments For Blythe, June, and Adelaide You treat me badly / I love you madly—SMOKEY ROBINSON, “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me”Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.—EDNA FERBER, “Preface,” Cimarron…gator skin seats, call me Dundee—RICH HOT PURPLE WATER GUN THE FLAMINGOS JUST STOOD THERE. Pink and plastic on the lawn, a flamboyance of sun-faded ornaments in the Blackwood backyard. Priscilla Blackwood sat in a small rocking chair with