Book Jacket Copy for Pullers

Pullers, by Tom Graves, is a masterpiece of gritty American comedy. From Bad Bill's Hawg Trawf Tavern in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, to the gumbo parlors of New Orleans, the oversized and oversexed contenders for the Professional Arm Wrestling Association world crown are "getting up" to clash hard. The media darling Steve Strong, who enters competition with a babe on each arm and pretends to drink a quart of motor oil before he wrestles, is hoping his steroid-shot liver can endure one more road test. The great gay hope, Scud Matthews, who leads his pistol-packing trainer on a chain that disappears "down the man's pants," is hustling the local champions in Southern backwaters just to "long-distance psych-out" the great Carroll Thurston a gentle and intellectual challenger who is almost tired of satisfying the lusts of "birds" -- small-built women who are irresistibly drawn to gigantic men.

Yearning for name recognition, big money and media attention, all the contenders have a weapon, a gimmick. It might be a patented designer drug fresh from the laboratories of Stanford, a dietary "secret" like live cockroaches, or a robotic arm built by M.I.T. It might be sending an enemy a bad case of crabs via a hired seductress, or securing the supernatural aid of a Louisiana "conjure woman." Whatever it takes to WIN!

Book Jacket Blurbs for Pullers

"If you only buy one book this year, this is the one."

--Harry Crews, author of Celebration and Scar Lover

"In Pullers, Tom Graves has brought the world of arm wrestling vividly to life in a funny, raunchy, rollicking read.”

-- Charles Gaines, author of Pumping Iron and Stay Hungry

"It takes a fine eye for the telling detail, a skillful manipulation of jargon and a mordant sense of humor to make a milieu as rare and unexplored as arm wrestling into a compelling drama of men engaged in a kind of war. A slam!

--Robert Campbell, Edgar Award-winning author of the best-selling Jimmy Flannery and La-La Land mystery series.

"Don't start reading this one until you've got time to finish it--because you're going to have an awfully hard time stopping once you start."

--Dave Marsh, critic and author of Glory Days and Born To Run

"Tom Graves provides a rousing, oftentimes hilarious chronicle of men tempting the edge and those who plunge directly over it. Whenever an author has this much fun at the keys, his audience has no other recourse but to join him."

--Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead

"Pullers is a veritable textbook on HOW TO WIN AT ARM WRESTLING. It is also A POCKET GUIDE TO USING STEROIDS and a FIELD MANUAL ON KINKY SEX. Tom Graves tells us things about professional arm wrestling--the techniques used to psych-out opponents, the sleazy settings for the contests themselves, the broken wrists, the compound fractures--we could never find out on our own without spending lots of time at interstate truck stops and the back rooms of unsavory beer joints along the back roads."

--John Fergus Ryan, author of Watching and The Little Brothers of St. Mortimer

Review of Pullers from The Washington Post Book World

 Sunday, January 24, 1999

"Arms and the Men"

PULLERS

 by Tom Graves

 Hastings House, 179 pp. $21

Reviewed by Frederick L. McKissack Jr. whose "Black Hoops: African-Americans in Basketball" will be published next month.

When Sylvester Stallone starred in "Over the Top," the sport of arm wrestling was subjected to the sort of Hollywood triteness and star-driven blandness that destroys the story and bores the audience. If there should be a new film on the subject, its creators would do well to take their cues from Tom Graves's engaging new novel. The arm wrestling is not what makes this novel motor; it's the depth and honesty of the characters. They are all flawed, some more than others, and yet they have heroic tendencies that come out in odd and endearing ways.

Meet Carroll Thurston, a bartender who dreams of being the super-heavyweight arm wrestling champion of the world. Standing well over 6 feet tall and tipping the scales at a robust 300 pounds, Carroll is not a typical dumb jock. Indeed, he's an intellectual son of Memphis and a former ad copywriter who ended a fine career by doing something that many a copywriter has dreamed of: attacking his diminutive, loudmouthed boss. Carroll loses his job, but his legend lives on in the mid-South.

A professional arm wrestler -- a "puller" -- is something Carroll has wanted to be since childhood. Other sports don't appeal to him, especially football. "I could never quite see the point," he says early in the novel. "All that hit, hit, hit. . .Plus, I never met a coach I didn't think was some kind of goddamned idiot."

Even in a fringe sport, Carroll's celebrity makes him nearly untouchable to the law (not that he does things that warrant close attention, although a laughable scene at the Peabody Hotel includes a SWAT team) and irresistible to women, whom he finds vacuous. "Just once, though he'd like to hook up with some strapping big-boned gal. . .And a little intelligent conversation would go a long way."

Carroll is No. 2 in the world; Scud Matthews is No. 1. Matthews is a huge puller from New Orleans with a flare for the dramatic. He deploys a plethora of tricks, physical and mental, to weaken his opponents. While Carroll doesn't go to "unsanctioned" contests, Scud and his tiny, intense coach, Itch, travel to misbegotten places like Pine Bluff, Ark., to pry a couple hundred bucks from unsuspecting rubes. And to top it off, Scud and Itch do not hide their homosexuality one bit, even in Pine Bluff, where the two first appear to the locals wearing matching T-shirts touting the phrase "We're Queer, Dear."

Every sport needs a legend, and to pullers Steve Strong is that man. What Arnold Schwarzenegger was to bodybuilding, Steve is to arm wrestling. Six-figure salary, Studio 54 nights, an appearance on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson, stories in Sports Illustrated. Those were the salad days for Steve Strong. Now he's a decrepit old man, dying in his Nashville home, with a penchant for flying into steroid-induced rages that he unleashes upon unsuspecting Girl Scouts and drivers.

There are other memorable characters that Graves allows us to watch: a bush league thug cum promoter who beats people bloody with a paddle; a wheelchair athlete with world-class speed who attracts as many women as his friend Carroll; a mother of a special Olympian who hates the use of the term "special."

Arm wrestling is as much about head games as any other sport. Pullers boast, blast, and blow as much air as say, basketball or football players. And Carroll and Scud perpetrate foul tricks on each other that would make G. Gordon Liddy proud. But for Graves the real action is not in the matches themselves, but in what is done in the hours, days and months before the competition. All of this obnoxious, Hunter Thompson-style craziness leads to a twisted, absurd and totally hilarious conclusion at the world championships in St. Louis, where the most disgusting tricks are unleashed upon the characters and readers' sensibilities.

In his acknowledgments, Graves describes the book as a product of his "warped imagination." Great. Let his mind warp all it wants if it continues to produce robust and funny stories like Pullers.

Order An Inscribed Copy of Pullers

Copies of my novel Pullers are in very short supply. However, I do have a few left and have a few sources for snagging some remaining copies. The cost is $21.95 plus $5.00 for shipping and handling. Send a check or money order and your shipping address to: Pullers, 2197 Cowden, Memphis, TN 38104 or pay through Paypal (click on link on this page). If you'd like your copy inscribed, please tell me the message you'd like inscribed. Because Pullers is now out of print and mint condition copies must be located from specialty booksellers, please allow up to four weeks for shipping.