Now Is Not the Time to Panic: A Novel by Kevin Wilson
Kevin Wilson delivers a witty and charming coming-of-age story in his latest novel, Now is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco). Twenty years ago, famous children’s author Frances Budge was an awkward teenage loner. She had no true friends, felt uncomfortable in her own skin, and believed there was more to life than living with her psychotic triplet older brothers and divorced mom in rural Coalfield, Pennsylvania.
POSTER CAUSES TOWN CRAZE
As an outlet, Frankie became a closeted Nancy Drew fanatic, driven to write her own warped version of the iconic teenage detective series. During the summer of her sixteenth year, she is bored out of her mind until a strange boy named Zeke moves to town. He is as geeky as she is — except where her talents lie with words, his lie with his artwork. The kids find they have a lot in common, both are trapped in the trauma of their respective father’s infidelities and unable to express their own pain.
During that fateful summer, the two create an enigmatic, unsigned poster and agree never to reveal its origin. Courtesy of an abandoned photocopier in Frankie’s garage, they lightheartedly duplicate their handiwork and plaster the words: “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us,” surrounded by Zeke’s intricate artwork, all over town. Long before social media, the poster goes viral.
The artwork appears everywhere, striking a chord with onlookers. Local imaginations run wild as people wonder who is responsible — Satanists, rock bands, kidnappers — especially when the mystery extends beyond Coalfield’s boundaries and becomes a national phenomenon. The poster develops a life of its own, threatening Frankie and Zeke’s friendship.
ARTICLE LOOKS INTO THE PAST
As an adult, Frankie’s world is rocked when Mazzy Brower, a journalist for The New Yorker magazine, calls her out of the blue. Mazzy is writing an article about the “Coalfield Panic of 1996,” and insists on interviewing Frankie for the piece.
Frankie and Zeke’s secret, and the mysterious mantra, have plagued Frankie every day of her life, and now she is panic-stricken about revealing the truth to the world. She has never admitted her part in the Panic to anyone, not her mother, her husband or her brothers. And since Zeke moved away shortly after the Panic, they have not spoken since the summer of 1996. Yet, he has always been on her mind.
With the impending article, Frankie’s notorious past is finally catching up with her. She is desperate. Will the truth about the Coalfield Panic of 1996 destroy her family, her marriage and her career? And what about its impact on her co-conspirator, Zeke?
CAPTIVATING COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL
In this lighthearted examination of teenage tomfoolery, identity and the power of art, Kevin Wilson has created a wonderful protagonist in Frankie Budge, as a teenager and adult. In Frankie, he captures teenage angst and impetuousness, and a woman scarred by the follies of her youth. No one can turn back time to remedy the past, and the adult Frankie harbors no regrets about starting the Panic.
While she feels guilt over any damage caused by the poster, she and Zeke had created the poster out of innocence, not malice. Or so she tells herself daily. The original poster has become her most valued possession, and Frankie wonders whether she has become obsessed with the tangible document, letting her secret overshadow her marriage, her daughter, and her writing. While Frankie is conflicted about revealing the truth, she questions whether revelation is possible.
Like the cryptic poster, Kevin Wilson’s quirky novel empowers the reader. Beneath its amiable veneer, Now Is Not The Time to Panic is more than a novel about a high school prank. It inspires the reader to take art seriously. Wilson pokes fun at a society swept up into a media frenzy over nothing at all. Finally, through his wonderful, complex characters, he underscores how people allow one minuscule incident to haunt them, altering the path of their lives. And how it requires immense courage to ultimately break free.
About Kevin Wilson:
Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine, and three novels, The Family Fang, Perfect Little World and Nothing to See Here, a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection.
His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South.
