Days of Class

A DEBUT LITERARY NOVEL from newcomer Christian Butler, a painfully thorough exploration of adolescent struggle and life in rural East Texas, rich in detail and in equal measure, intimate and deeply personal 

For Ethan Ramos, the fall semester of 2005 heralds the start of his last year at Upshur High School… His hometown and small, rural community, Upshur remains nestled deep in the forests of Northeast Texas. Having spent an adolescence in exile as consequence of his childhood indiscretions, there’s been no escaping his troubled history, here, or the guilt and rage borne of a lingering memory which, upon his return to Upshur as a freshman, remained with him, having followed in his shadow. Only, during those interim years away, the events of a past, both distant and distressing, seem to have gone forgotten…

…a long-ago discarded memory…

Now, as a prodigious athlete part of the Upshur Buckeye football dynasty, Ethan suffers an early-season injury threatening to end his athletic career and prospects. Taken in by a small circle of unlikely friends, he then finds himself in the company of a classmate with whom he shares a complicated history, their eyes the striking green of the verdant forests—

a terrible reminder of a childhood he’d long since left behind…

As questions of legacy and purpose emerge—each passing day propelling them ever-further towards an inevitable future—there comes, also, the promise of change, of reverberative consequences for each of Ethan’s relationships: with friends, family, and classmates—culminating in the pivotal events of a journey’s end…

…of their final days of class.

In this literary piece and first outing as novelist, Christian Butler means to share an examination of lived experience, using the strengths of the form and medium as well as his own experience to conjure a distinct mirror-image of the world we know, and in such scope and of sheer density, room enough is given to explore the boundaries of agency—free from the fear of judgment. As an intricate tapestry, painstakingly interwoven by narrative threads made of the characters’ steps along an arduous path, Days of Class altogether reveals, in its patient and deliberate unfurling, an unbridled meditation on this newfound notion of presence—how we move, how we act—and what it means to choose…



Reader discretion advised: graphic sexual content and drug use