Beachy has a distinct and very funny voice, and the book’s mood of confused longing sticks with you...It’s affecting and a little bit strange—and when I was done I vowed to read whatever Beachy writes next.

Anyone looking for a juicy-as-hell story about why the Times hasn’t yet reviewed The Slide please contact me and I will be happy to make one up.

And that’s why today The Slide becomes only the fourth book in CCLaP’s history (and the first this year) to earn a perfect score of 10, and why in my opinion it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see this get a dark-horse Pulitzer nomination come next year. It’s one of those books that makes you feel all funny and sad and strange afterwards, one of those books that inspires cults among 23-year-olds…What a treat this book was, a truly unexpected treat, and what an astounding future Beachy has in store for himself as an artist. I recommend jumping on the bandwagon yourself as soon as possible.

Beachy writes with quiet force about innocence and corruption, about how even something as transparent as water can be a source of deception. In sizzling dialogue, madcap action and striking soliloquies, Beachy grapples with the toxicity of ambivalence and the complexities of inheritance, grief and the failure to communicate as his brooding young hero begins to discern what it means to be a man.

The Slide is the funny, haunting and tense coming-of-age story of Potter Mays…and it is quite a stunner. Sort of like a less loquacious David Foster Wallace, or a less self-conscious Brett Easton Ellis…Beachy is an astute, empathic observer. [He] has filled The Slide with wry observations and moments of great tension.

And I’ve been alerted to yesterday’s Boston Globe calling The Slide “an unusually good, and unusual, coming-of-age story.”

Vivid, complex and often funny…readers everywhere will appreciate the universal themes that make this fresh and fierce novel such a great read.

There’s also a short interview included, touching on fatherhood, baseball, arteries, and craters.

“Kyle Beachy has a knack for fantastic little nuggets of observation…Like his protagonist, the first-time author is brimming with potential.” — Entertainment Weekly.

“Suspenseful, erotic, funny, and terribly sad, THE SLIDE presents the long, hot 22nd summer of Potter Mays, the most ethical sexual deviant this side of Portnoy–or Hamlet.”
– James McManus, New York Times bestselling author of Positively Fifth Street

“With THE SLIDE Kyle Beachy turns the coming-of-age story on its ear. But THE SLIDE is about a lot more than a young man’s increasingly frantic efforts to figure himself out. There’s the decay of both the American city and the American nuclear family, the painful inevitability of friends and lovers growing apart, and the ongoing difficulty of denying one’s base appetites. Plus baseball. Lots of baseball. What’s most impressive, though, is that Beachy has emerged in his debut as a fully-formed stylist. His writing is propulsive, unique without being forced, and eminently readable.”
– Ron Currie Jr., author of God is Dead

“Kyle Beachy has written a knockout first novel. Part love letter to the  American Midwest, part ghost story, and part heartbreaking tale of one young man’s struggle to find forgiveness as well as himself, this is a book that you won’t want to miss.”
– Cristina Henriquez, author of Come Together, Fall Apart