Searching for Cool, Praying for Heat: Love, Loyalty, Race, 1960

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Searching for Cool / Praying for Heat is an irreverent 98K-word commercial novel of love, audacity, and loyalty amidst the sinister world of Southern white supremacy. In Legrand, a small North Carolina mill town in 1960, the New England-transplanted O'Rourke family is horrified when the daughter of a Negro friend is brutally raped. In trying to help her, the O'Rourkes find themselves targeted by the town's white leadership, the Pharaohs, who take revenge on Brian, the 17 year-old protagonist. Through a shifting POV, we follow the O'Rourkes as Brian grapples with love, loyalty, art, and racist violence. Brian O'Rourke obsesses about love and the possibility of sex. He is infatuated with a curious trinity of women: Angela, a church choir-singing-but-sexy classmate, Marilyn, twelve years older, a nurse who has given Brian allergy shots for three years, and Sis Mary, a free-thinking visiting New York artist who teaches a local art class and encourages Brian's exceptional gifts. Brian reveres Kerouac's On the Road and Ginsberg's Howl and listens to Miles Davis and other jazz and blues masters. Meanwhile he and his school friends hatch imaginative pranks in Legrand's new for-whites-only high school. On weekends, Brian works in a textile mill and meets Valdese Landry, a black machinist who rides a big Harley. When Brian is seen riding around town with Valdese, the Pharaohs dispatch the Klan and Brian is almost killed. As Brian recuperates in intensive care, his besieged family begins packing to seek a new life elsewhere. He's heartbroken to leave friends and his beloved female trinity. Quite unexpectedly, both Amanda and Marilyn secretly surprise Brian in two erotic scenes near the end of the novel. When seeing Nurse Tiddy for the last time, Brian proclaims his deep love for her. Swearing him to secrecy, she privately gives Brian a prescription that proves to be an afternoon of lovemaking initiation, with her as his private teacher. In the final chapter, Brian, no longer a virgin, moves away leaving behind much that is dear, but with a new understanding that he must honor those he loves and treasure those who love him.