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Rudy is an ex-rodeo cowboy with many injuries, born twenty years too late. Mentally, he lives "in an earlier generation when morality and one's word would define who and what you were." Rudy works in a feedlot but then becomes a truck driver—a modern-day cowboy, riding the road instead of the range. Rudy's life is misery: "On a ten-point scale with ten being best he was probably a negative one million." Low income, a disastrous bride ("the mistaken half of his marriage"), and a father-in-law from hell ("He was and is the biggest, fattest, amoral piece of monkey dung that ever crawled from within a sewer since time began") don't help.
The author himself is an ex-rodeo cowboy with many injuries, and his blood runs in his protagonist's veins. Dam's style exhibits a unique flair, dense and creative, as if Faulkner met up with James Joyce. For example, Rudy works "as fast as possible yet moving with the similarity of a snail." When denied a cigarette, his "intent was indulging in a nasty habit he had given up years before, therefore a major malfunction was trying to transcend." Many sentences, such as one where he graphically characterizes his promiscuous wife, are followed with a smiley face icon. The life of Rudy comes alive in creatively crafted prose, showing a cowboy's mentality: tough it out until it gets better. The book leaves one wondering whether his tale is the end of a beginning or the beginning of a new end. Either way, Dam's book is a thought-provoking read.