No Exit Press - Chocolate Lizards by Cole Thompson

ABOUT THE BOOK

When a Harvard-educated aspiring actor loses all of his cash during a bus-ride poker game, he finds himself stranded in Abilene, Texas, broke and desperate. Enter Merle Luskey, a hard-drinkin', tough-talkin', oil-drillin', woman-lovin' wild-catter who just happens to have a job opening. About to lose his oil rigs and his ranch to the bank, Merle has a proposition for his new friend: he needs a "rat killer," someone smart enough to help him outwit the bank, the sheriff, and a rival drilling company in a frantic race to hit pay dirt before the foreclosure goes through.

What ensues is a rip-roaring conflagration of unbelievably vibrant characters, including a drunken cattle rancher who owns the land that Merle wants to drill on and also owns every issue of Playboy ever published, speaking so fondly about the centrefolds you'd think they were kin. And meet Tex-Ann, a busty gum-snapping blonde imported from Dallas to—ahem—persuade the cattle rancher to sign on the dotted line.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

'Definitely one for all the line dancers out there. Yeehaw! - The List Thompson hooks you like a novice trout in a paddling pool...and he doesn't let go.' - The Times

'Chocolate Lizards is an extravagant and very entertaining example of West Texas oil-field gothic. It's as if the Castle of Otranto had been moved to Abilene, Texas, and peopled with refugees from Monty Python ' - Larry McMurtry

'Driving through West Texas, you'd swear the pump-jacks grow right out of the ground. They are as much a part of the scenery as shinnery brush. Drillers and roughnecks live by their own set of rules—a breed apart. Cole Thompson has written a great book and I think he captured it all, even the insanity ' - Waylon Jennings

'A hymn to West Texas and its plain talkin red neck ways. ' - Time Out