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National Book Award, Fiction, 2010 On the rock-bottom end of the activity of kings rests the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horses racing, where instructors and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts are all struggling to consider an advantage, or verify their luck, or just survive. Equal parts Nathanael Western world, Damon Runyon and Eudora Welty, Lord of Misrule follows five people -- scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain -- by having a season and four races at Indian Mound Downs, downriver from Wheeling, Western world Virginia. Horseman Tommy Hansel has a program to save his failing stable: He'll ship four mysterious but ready horses to Indian Mound Downs, run them in cheap claiming races at long possibilities, and then gut out fast before anyone notices. The catch is, as of this rundown riverfront half-maile racetrack in the Northern Panhandle, every person notices -- veteran groom Medicine Ed, Kidstuff the blacksmith, old girl "gyp" Deucey Gifford, stall superintendent Suitcase Smithers, eventually even the ruled-off "racetrack financier" Two-Tie and the ominous leading trainer, Joe Dale Bigg. But no person bothers to factor in Tommy Hansel's go-fer girl, Maggie Koderer. Like the beautiful, used-up, tragic horses she involves love, Maggie has sufficient heart to line everyone's flagging expectations back to the original source of all good fortune.
