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Grady Hayes is a young high school football player being raised by his hard working single mother. His life revolves around football, until—in a game against cross-county rivals—he breaks his leg. Cut off from his teammates, Grady is lost. He takes prescription pills to dull the pain and pass the time. But when his leg finally heals and Grady tries to return to the team, his spot has been filled and he can’t relate to his teammates anymore.
Grady takes up with Hambone, a brooding older boy, and they start hunting together in the swamp at night. Their relationship is volatile, fueled by alcohol and pills, and their hunting ritual quickly turns dark and carelessly violent. Feeling helpless and out of ways to stop her son’s downward spiral, Grady’s mother asks his estranged father to pay them a visit to set Grady straight, leading to a tragic family reckoning.
Told in the keen, honest voice of a young man growing up in the rural American South, The Big Game is Every Night is a literary novel that will appeal to readers interested in better understanding the cultural forces that shape contemporary blue-collar America.
“Robert Maynor knows South Carolina. He knows catfishing and football. More than anything, though, he knows how to spin a yarn. Each line of his poignant debut bleeds raw emotion and powerful, dark energy. The Big Game Is Every Night hits like a linebacker on a backside blitz. Not to be missed.” —Eli Cranor, author of Don't Know Tough
“Written in spare yet evocative prose, Robert Maynor’s The Big Game is Every Night is a quiet and powerful meditation on broken families, fractured friendships, the pain of reckoning with having the thing that most defines you taken away in an instant, and the legacy violence leaves in its wake.” —John Vercher, author of After the Lights Go Out
“One of the most honest works of fiction I have ever read. The Big Game Is Every Night is a bruised and brutal debut about a boy on the precipice of manhood and all the terror it entails. Maynor’s novel made me want to cradle my two sons and never let go.” —J.C. Sasser, author of Gradle Bird
“The Big Game Is Every Night is a Southern coming-of-age novel that grapples with serious questions about the difference between being a man and being a good man.” —Jeff Fleischer, Foreword Reviews