Tupelo Hussman, ”gods with a little g” w/ Jim Krusoe

A vibrant, powerful literary novel, gods with a little g is the story of Helen Dedleder, a teen trapped in politically bright red and extremely religious town, Rosary, California, with a widower father who is a true believer. Helen’s mom lost her battle with cancer when Helen was a child and her dad is mired in his grief, lost to the consolation prize of prayer, or so he seems until he finds love with the mother of the leader of Rosary’s rebels (the Dickheads), who also happens to be Helen’s secret crush. Helen tries to escape her father’s burgeoning romance and her own confusing feelings for the king of the Dickheads by focusing on her work apprenticing her aunt, the county’s lone psychic and spiritual rebel. 

When Helen begins her first real friendship with Win and Rainbolene, siblings just arrived in Rosary with an urgent desire to depart—Rain in part because she’ll finally be able to get the hormones she needs to full become herself—she starts to see a future for herself for the first time outside of the tea leaves she tries and fails to read under her aunt’s tutelage, though it may be too late. 

Set in a near version of the current political apocalypse, gods with a little g is about how being a teenager is an apocalypse all its own: there must be destruction for there to be hope. 

Author Tupelo Hussman is in conversation with Jim Krusoe, who  has published six novels and two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions.