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

"I'm pretty sure at Valley Forge, they were fighting against having a king, Shane."

"I'm just saying the call went out," the undaunted Shane said, "and true patriots have answered, and our time is nigh."

"You know what? I got a thing at nigh." Rhys pretended to look at his watch. "Can we do it at nigh thirty? Maybe quarter to rapture?" Rhys glanced over at Celia's husband, a retired high school math teacher—Are you hearing this?—but Cortland was snoring away.

It was quiet for a few more minutes, Shane pouting at being teased, Kinnick doing his best to let it go. He would eventually tell Bethany that: I tried to let it go.

You egged him on, Bethany would say.

I tried to steer us back to football! Rhys would insist.

"So, they script every play?" he asked Shane. "Or just the final score?"

"I mean, they leave room for ad-libbing, but yeah, everyone basically knows who will win before the game starts. It's been scripted since 2008." Shane leaned across the arm of his recliner. "Think about it for a second, Rhys. There's literally billions of dollars at stake. You think they're just gonna leave that to chance?"

"Right," Kinnick said. "So, the owners get together and decide before the season who's going to blow a knee, who's going to fire a coach, who's going to win the Super Bowl?"

"Owners?" Shane scoffed. "You think the owners run the league? Owners are patsies, Rhys! Wake up! You gotta follow the money on a deal like this."

After getting a degree in natural sciences Kinnick had been an environmental journalist for thirty years, at a paper in Oregon, at a Portland magazine that went under, and finally, in Spokane, where the foundering newspaper "offered" him a buyout in 2015. And now, what could be more depressing than his carpet-laying, truck-driving, recovering-addict son-in-law lecturing him to follow the money?

"This"—Shane held up the remote—"is where the money is."

"Remote controls? Sure." Kinnick leaned in. "So, who's behind it all? Best Buy? RadioShack?"

"Think for a minute, Rhys!" Shane tapped his own head with the remote. "I'm talking about . . . the media." Or me-juh, as Shane pronounced it, that word being one of the four—elites, liberals, and socialists were the others—that found its way into every Shane Collins conspiracy theory. "And I don't need to tell you who controls the media."

"No, you don't."

"The so-called—" Shane said.

"Please don't say it." Rhys pointed with his beer bottle. And, for a moment, Rhys thought maybe the worst was over, that they'd make it to dinner after all without a problem.

But then Shane added, "I mean, they don't call it Jew York for nothing."

"I wish you wouldn't say stuff like that, Shane."

"Hey, I'm pro-Israel! No one loves the Jews more than me. The real Jews, I mean. Jesus was a real Jew."

In his defense, Rhys would later think, he had endured four years of such nonsense, ever since Shane had traded his mild drug habit for a Jesus-and-AM radio addiction—"real Jews" and "real patriots" and "Black-on-white crime" and "owning the libs" and the "lame-stream media" and the "vast conspiracy" perpetrated on "real Americans," by which Shane always meant people like him.

This raw sewage had been seeping into American drinking water for years, until it eventually contaminated the mainstream, and won over enough Shanes to convince the chattering TV heads and Twitter-taters that such half-assed conspiracies were a legitimate part of the body politic, that somehow, they had to do with white, working-class people getting the short end of some imaginary economic stick.

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.