D.S. Davis is a Florida writer from the Tampa area. I’ve enjoyed all his books so I sent him an early copy of Green Flash at Sunset. Not only did he provide a blurb that I included on the back of the book, but he wrote this review on his substack. Sign up for his substack. It costs you nothing.

Review:

“In Green Flash at Sunset, Nic Schuck blankets the state of Florida with a narrative of violence, grace, and the aching weight of memory.

As is true in the world Schuck is aiming to reflect, it is difficult to find a hero in the novel. Each major character seems to be dragging a shameful past behind them. Randall, the fishing guide haunted by a teenage betrayal, and Eli, the one-eyed street magician who performs for drunken tourists and wrestles with a past soaked in blood and circus dust, are rendered with a raw intimacy. You don’t just see these men—you seem to live inside their skins.

Then there’s Janet, raised in the back pews of despair, battered by a monstrous man and the kind of silence small towns teach young girls to swallow. Her journey from submission to selfhood is slow, painful, and utterly convincing. Paired with Stacy Ringling, a firebrand country singer who kicks bullies in the groin and writes songs about meth dens and dogfights, the two women form the aching core of this novel. Their friendship is a wild, tender lifeline—something Schuck writes with a delicate balance of grit and reverence.

As is true in his prior work, Schuck’s prose is heavy and tight, flowing with grace and experience. He writes about child abuse, addiction, sexual trauma, and institutional rot with an unvarnished honesty, but he never lapses into despair for despair’s sake. Instead, what emerges is a kind of battered hope—ugly, crooked, real.

The mosaic form of the novel, bending time and point-of-view, work like bright lights hung across a summer night’s porch. Each voice within the novel is unique, and each story is sturdy and complex. From a clown swallowing a goldfish at a child’s birthday party to a bingo parlor heist, Schuck once again delivers on the vivid Americana that has made him so enjoyable to read.

In the end, Green Flash at Sunset isn’t about redemption so much as it is about resilience—the stubborn kind, the kind that smells like salt and rust and hot asphalt. It’s a love letter to the misfits and runaways, to those who keep showing up even after the worst has happened. Like that elusive green flash at the moment the sun dips into the Gulf, this novel flickers just once with impossible beauty before slipping back into the dark.

Nic Schuck is a Florida-born writer whose fiction captures the grit, grace, and contradictions of life along the Gulf Coast. Schuck draws on his deep roots in the South to tell stories about working-class lives, fractured families, and the resilience of those on society’s margins. Green Flash at Sunset is set to release on June 2, 2025.”

Preorders available here: https://bookshop.org/shop/PanhandleBooks