Well Deserved

Michael Loyd Gray's stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Alligator Juniper, The Fiction Week Literary Review, Bone Parade, I-70 Review, Westchester Review, and Literary Heist. He is also the author of six novels. Well Deserved won the Sol Books Prose Series Prize (2008) and King Biscuit, his first YA novel, was released in 2012. Both are set in Gray's fictional small town of Argus, Illinois, which is also the setting for The Last Stop. His novel The Armageddon Two-Step (2019), won a Book Excellence Award.Gray earned a MFA in English from Western Michigan University, where he was a Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society scholar and a fiction editor for Third Coast. He served as a staff writer for newspapers in Arizona and Illinois, and currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he collects electric guitars (up to a dozen now) and listens intently to blues and vintage rock. Gray teaches creative writing and literature for several colleges when not grappling with a new guitar lick. He has two lazy cats, Suzie Lucifer and Yoda Lucifer.

The folks of Argus, Illinois, from the small-time dealer to the returning Vietnam vet, the townie grocery clerk and the new sheriff, all know what they want out of life, but the paths to their desires are conflicted and unclear. In a narrative with all the clarity and determination of a prophecy, Well Deserved chronicles the struggles of these four people as they come to the stark realization that their paths are not solitary, but entwined, and their very lives hinge on one shared moment.