Kindle Edition Amazon Category:  Sports/Recreation Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC ISBN-10:  1544840306 Type: Fiction Pages: 249 Copyright: March 29, 2017 ISBN-13: 9781544840307 Price: $3.99 (eBook) Barrie Jarman is just what stock car racing needs. He just can't get the powers that be to understand his appeal. Stock car racing is in decline. Its fan base is shrinking and aging. Along comes Barrie Jarman, an 18-year-old virtuoso from the wrong side of the Spartanburg, South Carolina, tracks. Barrie is athletic, articulate, brash, and rebellious. Thanks to his Uncle Charlie, an old FASCAR hand, Barrie gets a chance to show what he can do, and Ford puts him in the Enervation Series with a top-flight team. But Barrie locks horns with the FASCAR leadership from day one. He has a hard time convincing them that he is exactly what they need. They just think he's a pain in the ass.           Excerpt Prologue I know precious little about how my brother Jim raised his boy Barrie. All I know is Jim asked me if I’d take the boy in, and, being as how I owned a little cabin nestled next to the pond, the same one Charlene and me lived in while the big house was being built, I said he could stay there. Jim said he’d be self-sufficient, pay for the light and water, and his share of the vittles, so he showed up as soon as school was out, towing a little four-cylinder stock car on a trailer behind a ’94 Ford pickup with 239,000 miles on it. Barrie Jarman was sixteen years old, built wiry and strong, peering at the world through a pair of blue eyes that would melt the heart of at least any woman shy of thirty-five. I picked up right away on him being a breed apart. Jim couldn’t have taught him all the lessons he’d learned. They were in him, and they had to come out. He didn’t ask me for help except in two areas. He said he needed to find a place to play ball in the fall, preferably a private school without any state-enforced regulations regarding attendance, and, when I asked him how he was going to afford a private school, he said it wouldn’t cost anything once they saw what he could do with a football. The second request was the location of the nearest junkyard because he said he needed to rummage around and find some parts that would make his little nineties-vintage Mustang go as fast on asphalt as he’d already made it go on dirt. We unloaded his clothes, a toolbox, and a pawn-shop guitar in the cabin. He said he’d bought that trailer because he could crawl up under it and work on his car, so we left it there, with the hitch sitting on top of a cement block, and Barrie got in my truck, and off we went to Short Stuff Johnson’s junkyard because Barrie said he intended to race somewhere Saturday night, and he had some work to do. I asked him if he’d ever thought about racing a Legends car, and he said those scaled-down miniatures were designed for bankers who’d gotten bored with golf, and he wasn’t studying about it. Besides, he said, those little “faggot wagons,” which he called them, cost twenty, twenty-five thousand dollars, and he could be the Andy Granatelli of the four-cylinder mods with that kind of money. I bought him a couple of slaw dogs at the drive-in. We split a large order of fries. Barrie almost got the cute girl at the counter to quit her job and come with us to the junkyard, but he got her name and cell-phone number. He didn’t eat but one of the slaw dogs because she was coming up on a break and asked him if he’d like to smoke a cigarette in the parking lot. He told her he didn’t smoke, but he’d make an exception for her. Once we got back in the truck and headed over to Short Stuff’s place, I learned quickly that Barrie didn’t feel like he needed me to be his second-string daddy but was interested in me and him being friends. He announced, matter-of-factly, that the little filly at Herman’s Hamburgers & Dogs would’ve likely jacked him off it hadn’t been the daytime. At the junkyard, I introduced him to Short Stuff, and Barrie walked around the place while me and Short Stuff talked about how it was hot as a firecracker, and the Braves weren’t going be no count again. Barrie returned in about an hour and told Short Stuff he’d be back in touch. On the way home, he asked me to stop off at the True Value because he needed some batteries for his flashlight. I got the impression Barrie was a right good athlete on Saturday when his previous coach showed up trying to convince him to come back home and play some more ball. Barrie said he wasn’t studying about it, but he’d be happy to have the coach tag along to watch him race his stock car that night. Barrie towed the yellow Mustang – it was coated in flat paint that looked suspiciously like what the highway department used to stripe the roads – while the coach, whose name was Varner Adams, gave me some company in my Silverado. It cost forty-five dollars a head for infield pit passes, so Coach Adams and I paid fifteen dollars each to sit in the first turn. Barrie told us he liked the view there, and it wasn’t like dirt, where the cars would fling chunks of clay at you. I told the coach that it was the first night out for both the car and the driver on asphalt, so he’d best not expect much from Barrie just yet. He won his heat race and lapped the field in the Mod-4 main, and that was enough to send Varner Adams back down to Spartanburg to find somebody else who could play quarterback. Barrie, who had gone to the track alone, came back to the cabin with a brand-new pit crew and a case of Milwaukee’s Best. I’m not saying anybody was into drugs, but the next day I noticed a decal of a marijuana leaf on the back of the yellow Number 50. I came in for a ham sandwich after cutting hay all Monday morning, and Short Stuff Johnson was sitting on the front porch. I half expected Short Stuff to have his shotgun with him, but he said that Barrie had left an envelope tacked to his door with a nice note and two hundred dollars for what he’d stolen from the junkyard one night. “Only problem is my dog,” Short Stuff said. “Barrie stole your dog?” “Naw. Apparently that boy tamed him. I been noticing that Chipper wouldn’t bare his teeth at a wino with a two-day stink. She’s a German Shepherd. You seen her, didn’t you?” “Yeah,” I said. “From a distance. With a fence betwixt us.” “About all I can get Chipper to watch now is a passel of baby chicks.” “That boy beats all ever I seen,” I told Short Stuff. “What you want me to do? Ask Barrie to come back over there and make your mutt mean again?” “Naw, don’t worry about it. I got a couple more mean’uns. I done got used to having Chipper for company now. Just tell that boy to come see me if he needs more parts. His credit’s good. I seen in the paper what he done at the race track Sat’dy night.”

'Days of Thunder,' by Way of Elmore Leonard
"Lightning in a Bottle" is not a long read, but by the end you will find yourself wishing it was much longer. Monte Dutton has written a novel that beautifully captures the idiosyncratic world of professional stock car racing. As someone who has also plied his trade at racetracks over the course of many years, I recognize the many nods to real-life people and events - some which racing fans might guess themselves, others which are more cunningly played out in the book. Dutton's Barrie Jarman is an archetype; one might describe him as a racing version of Holden Caulfield, except instead of being hampered by the weighty cynicism of that character, Barrie Jarman navigates through life cannily turning the world's cynicism against itself. There is an authenticity of phrase and attitude that Dutton employs honestly, thanks to his many years not only covering racing but living a life in the heartland of stock cars and racing folks. You get the sense that there is a little bit of Mary Sue at work with Barrie Jarman, but certainly not to the extent that it affects the narrative. Indeed, it adds flavor and nuance to the same disaffections with modern sport expressed by modern fans. Racing fans may kvetch on social media and complain to each other about what ails NASCAR and how it should be fixed; Monte Dutton gracefully allows Barrie Jarman to offer his solutions indirectly.
All in all, "Lightning in a Bottle" is the fiction version of Monte's racing writing - brief, impactful, distinctive, and leaves you wanting more without spoiling things by actually giving it to you. A worthy addition to any race fan's - and reader's - library.

Part Critique, Part Retrospective,Wholly Engrossing
"Lightning in a Bottle" is as much of a coming-of-age story as it is a tale about racing. It's a story of a young racer, Barrie Jarman, told from the perspective of his uncle, a veteran of the sport. Barrie, a teenage short-tracker in stock car racing's home territory, moves in with his uncle Charlie as he seeks (and finds) a path to racing's big leagues. Streetwise beyond his years, Barrie welcomes his uncle's input and regards him as his adviser and confidant. Barrie's path to the top is short, but once there, he discovers that his candor and openness are not entirely welcome in the PR-sanitized public face of professional racing, and his seemingly-boundless talent will be the least of his worries.

Country Comes to Town
I found this a good book to read if you are interested in auto racing. I LOVE auto racing! Being from South Carolina I enjoyed the writing style of Monte Dutton. And some of the new faces in NASCAR came into the sport and reacted exactly as Barrie Jarman did in FASCAR. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes racing and is looking for a fast read!