Kindle Edition Amazon Category:  Literary Fiction Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC ISBN-10:  1530854792 Type: Fiction Pages: 362 Copyright: July 21, 2015 ISBN-13: 9781530854790 Price: $3.49 (eBook) Chance Benford has to start all over. He doesn't know how. He doesn't remember what happened. He finds his own way ... with a little help. Chance Benford is a fine football coach who is out of control, and his life comes tumbling down. He loses his wife, job and very nearly his life. While Chance recovers, having no memory of the month before his accident, he reads the Bible and develops his own vision of Christ's teachings. Almost by accident, Chance gives his testimony at a church. A video goes viral. Suddenly, he is in demand. His message comes to the attention of a powerful evangelist. Chance doesn't want to be a powerful evangelist himself. It all gets thoroughly out of control.       Excerpt CHAPTER ONE THE NUMBNESS It was such a beautiful Friday, leaves bright and glorious in the November sun. The autumn always seemed so colorful to Chance Benford, as if God, or Mother Nature, or whoever was in charge, just slapped new lenses on the sunlight every now and then. August always seemed so … bleached. The grass faded from emerald to a dull hybrid, its glory diluted by gray and brown. Now a snap that matched the coach’s step was in the air. On the one hand, his mind had grown numb, as if on some cerebral autopilot. He just cruised through life: his job, his commitment, and, until recently, his family. The wife, sweet, fragile Elise, was gone, had been since a week after Labor Day, and was likely at her parents’ home in Corning, New York, moping around and crying in front of some antique mirror. Her cell phone had changed. She hadn’t really told Chance anything since, with an urgency unusual for her, she just left. Gradually, Chance’s emotions had boiled down into the purity of two words, all else having evaporated in the passage of time and his numbness. Good riddance. She didn’t want kids. She didn’t like Kentucky. She didn’t like a town this small. She didn’t like the churches. She didn’t like the food. She didn’t like the mountains. One day she announced she didn’t love her husband of four years anymore. She left the next day, and there’d been nothing since. He’d expected someone serving divorce papers but hadn’t heard a thing. He’d wept a little – oh, just eyes moist, really -- the day she’d left, but he was too busy to feel sorry for himself, and, after a time, he’d gotten over it. Elise had taken the Cavalier, and Chance had gotten the best end of that deal because the Ram truck was just a couple years old. Poor Elise. Never learned how to drive a stick. Chance just knew she’d have roared away in his big silver truck if she’d had a clue in hell how. Chance was happy, or at least he reckoned he was. He’d gotten used to not having his lovely, vulnerable wife around, and most of the times he thought of her, he chuckled and imagined her having to hear all those variations of “I told you so” from the parents she could never please, anyway. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Elise’s departure had marked a low point, and that everything had just roared to life beginning with the Monday she’d roared the hell out of town. One Saturday night, a gal had asked Chance what he did for a living. He’d thought a moment and replied, “Mainly, ma’am, I roar.” He did. It was his first year as a head football coach, and he was so ambitious that his good-looking wife had just been in the way. With her gone, Chance had dedicated himself to his new job with burning zeal, and those who paid attention knew it was a damned miracle. The team hadn’t won a game the year before, and Chance had been named head coach only after the superintendent had discovered, much to his chagrin, that almost no one else wanted it. Kentucky was a basketball state, anyway. Chance had somehow managed to steal a few boys away from old Wendell Woodfin, who’d actually had four or five decent teams in his twenty years sitting on the folding chairs that passed for a bench. The football stadium wasn’t much. It probably wouldn’t seat 1,000, both sides included, but there wasn’t but one game left to play, and Coach Benford was six victories up and three losses down. Every team that had beaten the Mustangs was going to the state playoffs. The Mustangs weren’t, but they had one more chance to make a good season memorable if they could manage to whip Hubert County for the first time in nineteen years. Tonight was “showtime,” as Cleavon Little might have said, and Chance Benford’s saddle was blazing. The numbness had begun in the summer at about the time practice was starting and his marriage unraveling. It wasn’t, in any sense, pain, and it didn’t seem to have any effect on his faculties. It sort of focused him. It made him want desperately to do what he loved. It stripped away the fences from his range. He barely considered seeing a doctor, and what was he going to tell the doctor, anyway? He couldn’t describe it, and it was like the little imperfections in his field of vision that he had noticed since he was a boy. If he thought about it, he could always see little, transparent etchings, moving and wiggling around, sort of like what one would see looking into a microscope if the sample had some kind of scenic slide in the background. If he told folks about that, they’d think him crazy, so he hadn’t told anybody, and he wasn’t going to tell anybody about the “numbness” that somehow made him twice the football coach and three times the man. Chance just didn’t give a damn about anything but winning football games. He became compulsive about it, and damned if it didn’t get results. He knew, against all odds, that this first team of his was going to win seven games and shock the whole state tonight, and that next year, the second team was going to win the state championship. He knew it because his numbness told him so. ELMORE HIGH SCHOOL HOME OF THE MUSTANGS Hubert County, Nov 8, 7:30 Chance smiled. Jed Larrimore hadn’t even put the football game on the marquee till the Mustangs had beaten Whatley in the third week and broken a fourteen-game losing streak over three seasons. Benford’s team hadn’t lost but once since. Elmore was a poor town. Half the mines had closed and the ones still running had cut way back. Some folks worked in the mines, some ran stores, some grew weed, others cooked meth, some sold dope and some didn’t do much of anything because they managed to steal enough to buy it. It wasn’t an uplifting place, but things had gotten a little better since Chance Benford had come to town. He had a little quarterback, Wally Ruff, who could run the option about as well as his daddy could run a honky tonk. Still, they couldn’t whip anybody straight up. He didn’t have but three assistants. It hadn’t looked like they were going to be any count – folks around there loved to say something “ain’t no count” – at the beginning, but that was only because they’d begun the season with nothing but fundamentals. The coaching staff had spent most of the preseason teaching form tackling, angles of pursuit, and proper footwork. It had taken most of one practice session to teach his rangy linemen how to get in a decent stance. All his players were scrawny; the linemen were rangy. On the road against Woolery, the Mustangs had been awful, but it was a fundamentally sound awful. What Chance had taught them was how to take orders and think on their feet. Asking those kids to think was quite a risk, but he made it fun. They drew up plays in the huddle and just ran them to see if they would work. If they did, they went into the playbook. The basic plays were mostly triple options, and the passes were mostly “play-actions” that offered the threat of a run and screens that exploited his line’s inability to prevent the opposition from storming into the backfield. Chance couldn’t make those boys good players, but he could make them passable actors. “Very few people are stupid,” Chance told them over and over, “but a heap offolks don’t bother to think.” About the only luxury conveyed the conquering head football coach was that Chance didn’t have a homeroom. This allowed him to back the Ram into his parking spot next to the gym and watch all the students as they socialized in the parking lot. Smoking technically wasn’t allowed on the school grounds, but as long as they confined it to the parking lot and they were outside the shadow of the building, no one much hassled them. Most of the boys wore raunchy tee shirts under flannels that were typically unbuttoned. The girls wore blouses that were frilly versions of tee shirts themselves. Most everyone wore jeans. The jackets were mostly blue with large block K’s in white. Kentucky Wildcats gear was functional in that royal blue was also the color of the Elmore Mustangs. Chance watched the arm-waving, awkward gaits of the kids who had probably gotten high within the past hour. He waved at them, smirking. “Coach!” one yelled. “Baaad ass!” Chance hadn’t smoked in ten years, other than that one time at his high school reunion back in Georgia. He’d been a junior varsity coach back then, near Knoxville, Tennessee, and secured permission to go home for the reunion. He’d been very drunk, anxious to show all his old buddies what a party animal he’d become, one thing had led to another, and the next morning he’d found a bag of cheap local pot in the pocket of his blazer. This he didn’t particularly regret, but he’d been well aware of the potential for scandal and stayed away from it since.

I Found Some Interesting Ideas on Which to Ruminate
Crazy of Natural Causes was a stream bed filled with gold nuggets. Without much effort, I found some wonderful ideas on which to ruminate. I shared many of them with my teens, who rolled their eyes - but I could tell they also listened. Indeed this is a wonderful gift for those of you who have coming of age young men in your lives. A story filled with football, weed, and Jesus as a mentor, this book appeals across religious lines. Lessons aside, the story line is very well thought out, the characters well developed, the pacing superb. Enjoy!

I Picked Up Crazy of Natural Causes Because I Loved the Title
I picked up Crazy of Natural Causes because I loved the title, and it gave me a sense of what the book was going to be like. I was not disappointed. The writing and cadence has a definite Southern feel; if that’s not your bag, then this book isn’t for you. But if you want something where you feel transported to Kentucky, this does the trick. The main character, Chance Bedford, is not your typical hero, or anti-hero, but rather a guy who feels real trying to find himself after a car accident. I didn’t always like his choices, but overall the book left me thinking long after I turned the last (digital) page. (Aren’t we all just trying to figure out what road we’re on and how we got there?) And while the story does sometimes meander, I always knew I was in good hands with a Southern storyteller taking his time. Definitely worth a read.

Another Great Effort by Monte Dutton
Another great effort by Monte Dutton, who seems to hone his style with every new novel he writes. Crazy of Natural Causes features a protagonist who has more than a few curveballs thrown at him -- and throws a few himself. The writing captures the dialect of Eastern Kentucky well: frank, unpolished and occasionally raunchy. At its heart, Crazy uses a good (not perfect) man to weave some interesting thoughts about Christianity in a post-Christian country all while keeping up a fast-moving narrative. Monte Dutton will make you think -- and that's always a good thing.