Suburban Gospel

by Mark Beaver

Overview

When the deacons at Mark Beaver’s Bible Belt church cue up an evangelical horror flick aimed at dramatizing Hell, he figures he'd better get right with God, and soon. Convinced he could die at age seven and spend eternity roasting on a spit in the fiery furnace of Hades, he promptly gets Saved.  But once adolescence hits, the Straight and Narrow becomes a tight squeeze. But Suburban Gospel offers more than a look inside Bible Belt suburbia, circa Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority—it’s a tale of faith and flesh. Beaver invites us into a world filled with Daisy Duke fantasies and Prince posters, Nerf Hoops and Atari joysticks, raggedy Camaros and the neon light of strip malls. As much about the adolescent heart as the evangelical mind, the story explores similar emotional terrain as coming-of-age classics like Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Mary Karr's Cherry. Suburban Gospel is a tale of growing up Baptist, all right—but also of just growing up.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938235191
Publisher:	Hub City Press
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mark Beaver's prose has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including North American Review, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Southeast Review, storySouth, Tampa Review, Third Coast, Louisville Review, Crazyhorse, Fugue, and elsewhere. In addition, his work has been shortlisted for the Best American Essays series. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC-Greensboro, he lives with his wife and daughters in his native Atlanta. Suburban Gospel is his first book.

Table of Contents

Invocation xi

1 Superwow! 1

2 Boys & Sex 23

3 Addressee Unknown 37

4 Lone Baritone 49

5 0 & 8 63

6 Rock Eagle 77

7 Hazzard County, GA 93

8 Soul Patrol 103

9 Taxidermy 113

10 Nervous 131

11 The Badmobile 149

12 Roadkill 173

13 In the Air Tonight: Prom '86 185

14 Prince and Apollonia 201

Benediction 221

Acknowledgments 239

Editorial Reviews

02/22/2016
In Beaver’s debut, a humorous and candid memoir, he recounts his coming of age in the suburbs of Atlanta in the 1980s. After a brief glimpse of him in 1975—when he was a seven-year-old who, out of fear of eternal damnation, began “acting the part of a good Baptist boy”—readers meet him in the summer after his 13th birthday, when it became suddenly harder for him to abide by those Bible Belt values. Beaver chronicles his experiences following this shift. Highlights include his summer at the Super Wow evangelical camp, dancing with a chaperone at a party, getting his first car (“the Badmobile”), and desperately trying to find amusement in suburbia. In a disarmingly conversational tone, he describes his attempts to reconcile his adolescent desires with his evangelical upbringing. Though the book’s trajectory feels somewhat predictable, Beaver’s voice is engrossing; his deadpan self-satire is as sharp as his observations about his community. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-02-03
A backsliding evangelical Christian shares stories of a warped youth spent shedding religion for adolescent shenanigans in the 1980s. In his affable, if somewhat tepid, debut memoir, Beaver writes about how his coming-of-age years were pre-empted by church services warning him of eternal damnation unless he devoted his life to Christian salvation. The son of a war veteran and blue-collar Southern Baptist deacon, Beaver's yearnings for mischief began to stir in his early teens while on an evangelical camping trip. At the weeklong gathering hosted by a pastor busy channeling the power of God, the newly baptized author busied himself with the glorious distraction of a nearby pretty girl "tucked inside a terrycloth towel." Beaver's carnal interests were further stoked by a neighborhood friend brandishing a stack of dirty magazines and a new telescope to spy on the frequently topless woman across the street. Whether concerning his adventures in the middle school band or obsessing over scantily clad TV vixen Daisy Duke, Beaver's anecdotes are consistently breezy and lighthearted, adding warm humor to an already ebullient sketch of his restless adolescence. The memoir's period detail is also notable, as it describes Georgia's rampant racial unrest and the trial of unrepentant serial killer Wayne Williams. At 16, Beaver was driving a beat-up Camaro with reckless abandon, and his primary mission was to achieve "vehicular amour" with a girl in the back seat. An ear piercing, prom night, and the loss of his virginity all promised a future of free-spirited years ahead—far away from life stuck in a stifling suburban subdivision. It also signaled a distinct divorce between the author and his staunch evangelical roots. In a contemporary, poignant closing chapter, Beaver joyously welcomes the birth of his daughter just a month after the passing of his father. Never preachy or self-righteous, Beaver praises the exhilaration of independence while keeping faith always within reach.

Kirkus Reviews