A Body’s Just as Dead

In the town of Drayton, Alabama, the once high-paying manufacturing jobs have been replaced by nail salons and bail bonds. Pete-O Hemper, a diabetic amputee in a wheelchair, feels betrayed by the America he once loved and believed in. On a steady diet of hate radio, he blames everyone around him for trying to remake his country into a place where men like him are no longer in control. Pete-O’s nephew, Robert, jailed on assault charges, is desperate for money and hatches a plan to rob a meth lab. Pete-O’s sister, Lilith Ann, the exhausted matriarch of this family, struggles to hold everyone together when Pete-O brings a Chinese bride to America with a past as dark as his. Sometimes darkly funny, A Body’s Just as Dead captures the 21st century frustration of small-town families who feel the American Dream is in shreds and resent having to share its remnants with people who “aren’t like us.”

Cathy Adams has been writing novels nonstop for
twenty-five years, ever since she wrote a play consisting of
two characters and five lines of dialogue as a first-grader.
Opening up the raw insides of what makes us who we are is
the basis for most of her stories—when a plot or character
makes Cathy feel uncomfortable, then she knows she needs
to write about it. A Body’s Just as Dead is inspired by an actual event and comes from her desire to understand why someone planning to buy AA batteries and toilet paper at a Walmart could end up shooting another person out of rage. A native of Alabama, Cathy is a Pushcart Prize nominated short story writer. She currently resides in Liaoning, China.