Breakfast with the Dirt Cult: A Review

An Oklahoman walks into a strip bar in Montreal. No, this isn’t John Prine’s Spanish Pipedream, this is Breakfast with the Dirt Cult by Samuel Finlay, and from this unconventional beginning I was hooked. Part-war diary, part-romance novel, part-Spenglerian commentary on the state of a civilization being run into the ground by delusional ideologues and kleptocrats who’ve just about finished stripping the last of the copper wiring out, this book is all heart. It is a hero’s journey set in a world where heroism is no longer held in high esteem by the ruling classes, the last of a dying breed: A soldier in love with a stripper.