Vada Prickett is a 29-year-old Hose Associate at a car wash in South Carolina, and Darla, the woman he loves, is about to marry his friend, rival, and life-long neighbor, Wyatt Yancey. Vada has "spent his life waiting for the thing to get a proper start." But it will never get that start, for Vada, as this wildly original novel opens, is being crushed to death by Wyatt's latest animal trophy, a stuffed grizzly bear Vada has been helping him to smuggle--against Darla's wishes--into Wyatt's house.

It turns out that the cliche is true--at the moment of death, your life does flash before your...