Kent Wascom’s aim is true in ‘The Great State of West Florida’

A young woman with a golden arm and a dark reputation is giving away money. “You might’ve seen her mean white pony car parked up in some vacant lot,” Kent Wascom writes in the opening of his new novel, “The Great State of West Florida.”

“There you are, in the glow of summer eternal, and you might’ve been a loser all your life, f---ed on and ignored, but slip that bill in your pocket and swear your oath, because you’re a West Floridian now, and everything’s gonna be different.”

Wascom’s first three novels, “The Blood of Heaven,” “Secessia” and “The New Inheritors,” followed the trail of the Woolsack family of West Florida from just after the American Revolution to the turn of the 20th century — a trail marked by material success and bloody violence.

They’re gorgeously written, ruthless books, evoking predecessors like William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews, and capturing the darkest side of the Sunshine State’s past.

With “The Great State of West Florida,” Wascom follows the Woolsack family into the future, although just barely — most of the book is set a couple of years from now in the Florida Panhandle.

That stretch of the state is part of the historical territory of West Florida, which in colonial times stretched from the Panhandle across the Gulf Coast edges of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. It was variously under Spanish and English rule, and briefly an independent entity, before becoming part of the U.S.

Wascom was born in Louisiana, raised in Pensacola and earned a creative writing degree at Florida State University, so the region is his turf, and he nails its present condition in this fierce and funny novel.

Its story begins in 2013 with the Battle of Tiger Point, aka the Gulf Breeze Massacre, a shootout among a group of people with tangled connections in a house in a subdivision in the “pastel strip mall wasteland” just across the bay from Pensacola.

The only survivors are a teenage girl named Destiny Woolsack, who will become the woman with the golden arm (gold electroplate, actually) known as the Governor, and a baby left in his car seat by his murdered mom.

When the story jumps forward, that baby, now 13-year-old Rally Woolsack, will be its main narrator. After the massacre, he was taken in by his Aunt Amber and her husband, Big Mike, whose older twin sons nicknamed him Murderbaby and bullied him mercilessly.

So Rally is relieved rather than disturbed when he’s more or less kidnapped in the middle of a rowdy party by his long-lost uncle, Rodney Woolsack, and Claudia, Rodney’s — well, that remains to be seen.

Kidnapping might not be the word, since Rally has tracked his uncle down online and sent him an SOS. But Big Mike responds to Rally’s attempted departure with an AR-15, and the party ends with a body count: “All their lives,” Rally says, “these folks had fronted trouble and here, at last, was the real thing.”

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That would be Rodney, who is famous on a popular app called DU3L, which features livestreamed real to-the-death gunfights. He’s won them all, so far. Claudia is just as lethal.

Rally will soon reconnect with another family member: Destiny, now known as the Governor, of West Florida, of course. For a couple of generations, the Woolsacks have been moving toward reclaiming their once-vast sway over the region.

But it’s complicated. A Florida legislator named Troy Yarbrough who, Rally tells us, “stole my Woolsack family’s whole idea” wants to create a breakaway West Florida as well.

He’s a powerful and charismatic political figure whose plan has been challenged on the Senate floor in Tallahassee, which resulted in an impromptu duel and a viral “clip of him putting a bullet through the eye of the state senator from Coral Gables.”

Does that get him arrested, or even damage his image? Be serious. Now a special session has been called to pass his bill, and the governor is likely to sign it.

But Rally’s family can’t get behind it. Their notion of West Florida grows out of a deep urge for freedom. Yarbrough’s is couched in freedom-ish rhetoric, but, as Rally notes, “what they really mean is a Jesus-riddled white ethnostate with a beachside pastel tinge.”

How it plays out is a pedal-to-the-metal wild ride, outlandish yet uncomfortably plausible. Wascom makes the satire work by always playing it just beyond the edge of reality, and here in Florida that edge is pretty far out there.

The Great State of West Florida

By Kent Wascom

Grove Press/Black Cat, 256 pages, $16.99

Meet the author

Kent Wascom will be in conversation about “The Great State of West Florida” with author Steph Post at 7 p.m. May 28 at Tombolo Books, 2153 First Ave. S., St. Petersburg. Free; RSVP at tombolobooks.com/events.