Excerpt from So Far Gone by Jess Walter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Who?" he heard himself ask. "The officials? You're saying the refs are in on it?"

Shane turned his head. "Refs? Come on, Rhys. You think the refs have that kind of power? Think for a minute: Who pays the refs?"

"Okay. So—" Rhys tried to keep it casual, asking over the rim of his beer, "you're saying the National Football League is engaged in a massive conspiracy . . . whose sole purpose is to deny victory to the teams you happen to like?"

"It's got nothing to do with me," Shane said. "It's common knowledge that politics and professional football were rigged the same year—2008. That's when the globalists put forward the final part of their plan: they'd already taken over universities, schools, every level of government, and they were about to give us a certain foreign president whose name I will not say out loud, but whose middle name is Hussein. The final push. They were starting to control sports, too. Don't forget who won the Super Bowl that year."

"No idea," Kinnick said.

"Two thousand eight? The New York Giants? Beat the New England Patriots? Think about it for just a second, Rhys. The Patriots? As in the real Americans? Losing to the Giants? Of New York? Giants as in the beast that rises out of the sea with seven heads and ten horns? As in the ten media companies and the seven boroughs of New York City? Come on, Rhys, you're a smart man. You think this is all a coincidence?"

"There are five boroughs in New York, Shane. And thousands of media companies."

"Then it's seven million people. I get the numbers mixed up."

"There are eight million people, and I seriously doubt that many lived in New York when Revelations was written."

"I told you: that's not how the Bible works, Rhys. It's a living document."

"It's not, Shane."

"Believe what you want." Shane was getting red-faced. "But I saw a thing on-line that explained the whole deal." He was always seeing things on-line that explained the whole deal. Or deals on-line that explained the whole thing.

"Wait a second," Kinnick said, convincing himself that logic might still matter with Shane. "But the Patriots won the Super Bowl last year!"

This, somehow, excited Shane even more, and he leaned in toward Kinnick and confided in him. "I know! That was awesome, a sign of the coming triumph, a clarion call for patriots to rise up and prepare for the final fight. See, New England wasn't supposed to win. The secular globalists picked Seattle to repeat as champions. But Brady and the Patriots wouldn't allow it. See? They broke the script. Stole that game at the goal line! Said, 'We will fight rather than surrender to the New World Order!' That's why the NFL had to start the whole deflate-gate controversy. To go after New England. As a warning."

This was the danger of winding up a toy like Shane. He could go on for hours like this, weaving every loose strand into a blanket of conspiratorial idiocy as he explained how, at the beginning of every season, NFL officials and team owners got together with TV execs, who handed out scripts for the season. But in the 2015 Super Bowl, Brady, Belichick, and the brave Patriots refused to go along with the globalist-satanist-liberalist-trafficker agenda, and they struck a blow for the original America! New England! Patriots! Thirteen original colonies!

It was the sort of logic hash that Kinnick had encountered when dealing with conspiracy theorists in his old job as a newspaper reporter, like the logger who once explained to him that some of the forest had been replaced with fake trees that were in fact surveillance devices. Gibberenglish, Rhys used to call it.

"New England's victory was a sign to all patriots," Shane said. "We've been waiting for a king to arise, and now, he was on his way. This election would be our Valley Forge."

Excerpted from So Far Gone by Jess Walter. Copyright © 2025 by Jess Walter. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.