This title is a finalist in the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction category of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Winners to be announced April 19, 2013 in Los Angeles, CA.

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Reviews & Interviews

Review in Publishers Weekly
Interview in Public Republic
Review in Cleveland Magazine
Interview with Word Riot
Review in The Plan Dealer
Promo piece in Red Fez
Promo piece in Word River Review
Article in the Cleveland Sun News
Review in Ampersand Review

Praise for The Natural Order of Things :

Keating toys with narrative chronology in this debut collection of interwoven stories that follows the lives of several “reprobates who have descended into... Hades.” At the center of an unnamed, ruined city of American industry thrives, tumorlike, a Jesuit high school and the Zanzibar Towers and Gardens, a flophouse where both students and alums slum it with prostitutes. In the opening story, “Vigil,” students have gathered at the Zanzibar to celebrate Halloween and the next day’s big football game with kegs of beer they stole from a senile priest in the final story, “Gehenna,” that was delivered in the second story, “Box,” by the father of star quarterback Frank “the Minotaur” McSweeney. “I’m counting on you. We all are,” says the Minotaur’s father, but the day of the big game, as in all the connected stories, we find out just how big a letdown everyone in this life can be. Story by story, the collection circumnavigates suffering—someone lights the homeless on fire at night; a merchant marine boxes up a man to ship him overseas; priests humiliate and shame their students, while one teacher loves them too much—in a place where most of its inhabitants “would rather gamble on a human life than try to save one.”
— Publishers Weekly

The Natural Order of Things is a dark and utterly compelling work with an unnervingly resonant vision of our present age. Excellent work by a fine young writer.
—Robert Olen Butler, author of twelve novels and recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts

[The Natural Order of Things] has dark traces of Hubert Selby, Celine, William Burroughs, even the Paul Bowles of "The Delicate Prey," and Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War, all set at a Jesuit high school in a modern, rust-belt metropolis drowning in sex, sin and violence. The language is intricate and tangled and beautiful... At a sentence by sentence and even word by word level [Keating] is masterful. I am in awe.
—Karl Taro Greenfeld, long-time writer and editor for The Nation, TIME, and Sports Illustrated; author of six books, including Triburbia, Boy Alone, and others

The Natural Order of Things is a work of gritty realism, populated with a cast of dark, flawed characters; Keating leads the reader through a labyrinth of stories with intelligent prose that unsettles.
—Martin Rose, author and reviewer for Shroud Magazine

Reading The Natural Order of Things is like holding a tattered masterpiece in your hands— individually the pieces are their own small works of art but the true brilliance isn't realized until you fit them together.
— J.W. Schnarr, award-winning journalist and author of Alice & Dorothy

Here is Kevin Keating, rallying against that tired old complaint, "Where are the new American voices?" He writes with verve, knowing, and wit—an explorer of the thin but deep fissure between privileged Jesuit school boys and the scrape-by world that surrounds it, lousy with hookers, drugs, and violence. In this carnival set in rusted and wrenched Cleveland, William de Vere is the kind of kid who'd slip Holden Caulfield a mickey and pimp him out in a sleazy motel, all while sporting his freshly creased school uniform. Here, then, a teen's wild exploration of the places and people—even in our advanced years—that we wish we had the courage to begin. And now we can. Thanks to Kevin Keating's vision.
—Michael Garriga, author of The Book of Duels