This is the best book you’ll ever read about mixed martial arts fighting; and this will still be the case even if it’s not the first book you’ve ever read about mixed martial arts fighting. Kerry Howley’s debut is a riotously entertaining and piercingly perceptive account of the contrasting lives and dreams of a pair of Iowa-based fighters whose battles in the ‘Octagon’ become the vehicle for a philosophical treatise on the nature of glory.
One of these fighters, Sean Huffman, is a journeyman; the other, Erik Koch, has dreams of the big time which, in this instance, means Las Vegas. Huffman, by contrast, makes do with dingy fights in hotel function rooms in a succession of no-name Iowa towns. Koch has an entourage; Howley is Huffman’s entourage or, as she puts it, she becomes his ‘spacetaker’. She tracks her fighters’ dreams and disappointments assiduously and her writing is as lithe and punchy as her subjects are in the Octagon.
The story is narrated through the eyes of ‘Kit’, a fictional philosophy student at the University of Iowa.
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