Nate’s nervous mother chews gum at warp speed and has a bob that resembles Darth Vader’s helmet. His icy father dabbles part-time in the death trade at a funeral home after working for a decade in the insurance racket. His older sister Holly is always lurking in the shadows or away at school. Nate, a creative, messy, and anxious teen, has chosen Randy Savage as his hero. As he finishes high school, the world to which Savage belongs is quickly waning in popularity, and Nate begins to see the wrestler’s downfall mirrored in his own life. But not until the family dismantles for good in 1994 does Nate’s life truly begin to fracture.

Savage 1986-2011 chronicles the middle-class implosion of Nate’s nuclear family, bracketed by July 1986 (when he first saw Randy Savage in person) and the wrestler’s sudden death in May 2011. When Savage dies, Nate is freed from beliefs, once a source of beauty and escape, that had come to constrict him, fusing him to a moribund past.

The novel is about the blurred lines between child and adult roles and the ever-changing landscape of interior heroism. Whether dealing with a family’s economic turbulence, the scarring effects of teenage love, or creating a new family order, Moore revisits, remasters, and repackages a twenty-five year family odyssey with guts, honesty, and love.

“This is Running Backwards with Scissors in Leaside. Nathaniel G. Moore’s emotional atomic drops and body slams in Savage (1986-2011) put the nuke in nuclear family. Moore writes in Technicolor (TM) — he’s a poet of fractured reality, minstrel of meltdown, clown prince of sad suburban absurdity.” (Zsuzsi Gartner, author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives)