Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon, fiction, 294 pages.
Winner of last year's National Book Award, Lord of Misrule follows full-time schemer, and sometime crazy-man Tommy Hansel, and his soul-mate, Maggie Koderer, as they descend upon Indian Mounds Downs, an end-of-the-road racetrack in Wheeling, West Virginia.
The book is steeped in the arcane language, the myths and superstitions, and the quirky characters of horse racing. Here you find Medicine Ed, the old, mumbly groom, a user of indifferent magic, trying to find a little bit of money that he can snatch and hold onto, enough for a little trailer, and a life where he only has to work two or three days a week. And Deucey, owner of last chance horses, knows that luck will only let her have the one. When a second horse arrives, she sees her bad luck looming. Joe Dale Bigg is what the track has instead of a real mobster. He is a school-yard bully grown into a sexual sadist. He is the dark part of everyone's small dreams at Indian Mounds.
The characters are all vivid, the track itself is isolated, suffocating, and inescapable for those characters; it is their world and they have nowhere else left to go. The story moves them all along briskly, taking them down unexpected paths as claiming races, forgotten horses finally living up to their potential, and out-of-town money bring about consequence upon consequence. A wonderful book.