Slim and The Beast is an adult American fable set in 2010 about male intimacy, the pursuit of passion, and the myriad ways in which young men in the USA can either transcend or succumb to that nation’s unresolved and violent past.

Two best friends, a country bar, a famous burger, and a bloodstained floor.

This coming-of-age tale isn’t for the faint of heart. Sergeant Chandler Dykes is obsessed with two Slim, a disillusioned war veteran with a brutal neck scar, and Hugh Dawton-Fields, AKA The Beast, a seven-foot UNC basketball player with a proclivity for Southern cooking.

As an early summer hurricane forces Slim and The Beast to take cover in a country tavern, the bartender tells them that Sgt. Dykes has been haunting the place, raving about opossums, bathtub whiskey, and his estranged favorite cadet, Slim. With unflinching humor and dexterous prose recalling the Coen Brothers' wit and Tom Robbins’ iconoclasm, the narrator observes the approaching hurricane and the ghosts it seems to be dredging up, laying out what's at stake in a friendship forged during the calm before the storm of the contemporary USA.

Originally published in 2015, the author bought back his publishing rights in 2022, and this definitive 10th Anniversary Edition is published by Kingdom Anywhere, an independent anglophone publisher in Paris founded by Lopez-Barrantes and his wife, the photographer Augusta Sagnelli.