The Pudneys Paperback – February 1, 2026

From Anxiety PressThe Pudneys traces the slow ruin of a working-class family caught between rural poverty and industrial false hope. From a violent beginning in eastern Kentucky to the factory floors of the Midwest, Warren Pudney chases respect, masculinity, and stability through marriage and labor, only to find each promise hollow. As humiliation replaces opportunity and survival hardens into habit, the family’s life contracts rather than improves. Unsparing and exact, the novel exposes the quiet brutality of the American Dream and the damage it leaves behind. “If you’re the type to stick your thumb out near the crossroads of Sinclair Lewis’s plainspoken cynicism and Jim Thompson’s deadpan drawl, you just might find yourself bumming a ride with Hugh Blanton, a chronicler of such low lives as would never think to chronicle themselves. Nothing much good comes to pass for The Pudneys - nor ever can or will - but this book stands as a testament to all their fitful, half-assed efforts to scratch and claw and survive.”- Dave Fitzgerald, author of Troll Read more