The Big Game Is Every Night

Told in the keen, honest voice of a young man growing up on the rural South Carolina coast, The Big Game Is Every Night grapples with masculinity, race, and family in contemporary blue-collar America.

Grady Hayes’s whole life revolves around football. When he breaks his leg starting a game against a rival high school, his life comes unglued. As he recovers, Grady grows bored and angry. He no longer relates to his mom, his cousin, or the girl he’s been talking to, and loses interest in catfishing and eating family suppers on the weekends. When Grady tries to return to the team, his spot has been filled, and there are rumors flying about why Coach made Grady a starting running-back in the first place.

Frustrated and alone, Grady falls in with Hambone, a brooding older classmate, who takes him deep into the swamps to hunt racoons and experiment with drugs. After an ugly confrontation with another player in the locker room, his relationship with Hambone turns dark and violent. Out of options, Grady’s mom calls in his estranged father to set him straight, and Grady realizes that his dad isn’t the man he remembers.

In his debut novel, Robert Maynor delivers a literary Lowcountry Friday Night Lights that shines a harsh light on the ways American men are steeped in violence, and how hard it can be to shake loose the toxic norms that unchecked can keep us all so far apart.

Praise for The Big Game Is Every Night

“Robert Maynor knows South Carolina. He knows catfishing and football. More than anything, though, he knows how to spin a yarn. Each line of his poignant debut bleeds raw emotion and powerful, dark energy. The Big Game Is Every Night hits like a linebacker on a backside blitz. Not to be missed.” —Eli Cranor, author of Don't Know Tough

“Written in spare yet evocative prose, Robert Maynor’s The Big Game is Every Night is a quiet and powerful meditation on broken families, fractured friendships, the pain of reckoning with having the thing that most defines you taken away in an instant, and the legacy violence leaves in its wake.” —John Vercher, author of After the Lights Go Out

“One of the most honest works of fiction I have ever read. The Big Game Is Every Night is a bruised and brutal debut about a boy on the precipice of manhood and all the terror it entails. Maynor’s novel made me want to cradle my two sons and never let go.”  —J.C. Sasser, author of Gradle Bird

“The Big Game Is Every Night is a Southern coming-of-age novel that grapples with serious questions about the difference between being a man and being a good man.” —Jeff Fleischer, Foreword Reviews

“Maynor’s novel is at its best when documenting Grady’s depression and alienation. A heartfelt story of ambition, family, and frustration.” —Kirkus Reviews