Wince

“There ought to be a warning sticker on this book—not about Wince’s drugs and guns, not about his offensive thoughts about almost everything, not about the felonious and antisocial mayhem that he causes wherever he goes, but about the real likelihood that you’ll somehow end up caring what happens to him. It takes guts to let a guy like Wince narrate your novel, but it takes a whole lot of skill to avoid caricature and to render up a real person. Smith’s novel succeeds as a harrowing satire of American masculinity and violence, but it also succeeds, against all odds, as a complex character study and a surprisingly tender exploration of friendship and loyalty.”

 —Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special

 “Anton Chekhov warned us about the gun on the mantelpiece, but his characters weren’t in the business of manufacturing weapons themselves. In telling the story of Winston ‘Wince’ Fisher, Jr., an irascible man with a penchant for AR-15s, Drew Nellins Smith gives the reader a front-row seat to one man’s hunt for a better tomorrow—which, from this angle, looks not unlike a roadmap to what lies beyond rock bottom. Imagine a James Ellroy character in a Charles Portis novel—or maybe the reverse—and you’ll have an idea of what to expect here.”

—Tobias Carroll, author of Ex-Members

“Wince is a trenchant, timely and hilarious noir—imagine a Coen Brothers adaptation of a Ross MacDonald novel about contemporary McMansion Gun Culture, and that will give you an inkling of this sinister romp.”

—Dan Choan, author of One of Us

“What will get to him first—a stroke or heart attack, the police, cartel enforcers, or his Uncle Gary? The well-named ‘Wince’ (short for Winston), a depressed, thrice-divorced, unreconstructed straight white Texan gun fanatic and cocaine addict who is running low on cash and obsessed with revenge on his old boss, is a guy whom you might not want to sit next to on the couch, but who is hard to take your eyes off. Drew Nellins Smith has created a singular protagonist who is very much of our times.” 

—Ted Conover, author of Newjack

“Wince is an audacious snapshot of our troubled post-COVID times—a world where you can order a gun as easily as takeout. Our guide through it, Winston Fisher, Jr., has no business winning our hearts, but he does. He’d be the first person I’d call if I was having a serious crisis. I loved this book.” 

—Patrick Hoffman, author of Friends Helping Friends

“An often engrossing crime saga that’s bound to be polarizing.” 

—Kirkus Reviews

“Funny, profane, sly and bruising, Wince delivers criminal thrills with satirical wit. Winston Fisher is a hero (anti-hero, unhero) for our time.” 

—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

“In Wince, Drew Nellins Smith has written a brutally funny novel about an American archetype we rarely see rendered this well: the aging gun guy. Winston is a ridiculous and detestable coke-fueled mess, and Smith narrates his commitment to self-destruction as a way of life so compellingly that it’s impossible to look away. Wince shows that guns are never just guns—they’re history, memory, manhood, and fulfillment of some of the darkest American fantasies.”

—Dr. Andrew McKevitt, author of Gun Country

“Taking a smart, but arrogant gun nut/coked out slob and making him into a likeable character would seem like an almost impossible task for any writer, but that’s exactly what Drew Nellins Smith has managed to do in his gritty, compulsively readable novel, Wince.”

—Donald Ray Pollack, author of The Devil All the Time

“Starting over at fifty-seven is hard enough, harder still if you’re a coke-addled criminal gun obsessive with a bum knee and an overbearing mother. Drew Nellins Smith’s fast, funny, colorful, and surprisingly humane crime story is propelled by the strong, companionable voice of its narrator, ‘the man, the myth, the legend, Winston Fisher, Jr.’ a.k.a. Wince to his friends (and a growing number of enemies). Part joker, part smoker, part midnight toker, his life may be off the rails but he is a man redeemed by a code and you will surely root for him through one last, improbable score, with a bit of hard-earned self-knowledge as the ultimate prize.”

—Mark Sarvas, author of @UGMan

“Wince gets at something about America’s relationship with firearms with a vividness that policy arguments often miss.

—Robert Spitzer, author of The Politics of Gun Control

“Boldly bleak and brutal yet strafed with moments of screwy tenderness, at once a meticulous study in modern male dissipation and a no-bullshit Texas noir, Wince is the aging-Gen X crime novel I didn't know I needed until I found myself unable to put it down.”

—Justin Taylor, author of Reboot

“Wince is a Chekhovian dive into the spiritual desolation of the American West, where in the big sky ring the echoes of civilization’s violence.”

—Nico Walker, author of Cherry

“Wince is not just the nickname of the protagonist of this dark comedy, it’s the reaction responsible gun owners will have to a character who uses his extensive knowledge of firearms to build and traffic automatic rifles to the cartel. But Wince is no cartoon villain. In the anti-heroic myth of Winston Fischer, Jr., Drew Nellins Smith puts a human face on the unsettling extreme of white male grievance culture, and that humanity is precisely what makes this book so disturbing and so hard to put down.”

—Dr. David Yamane, author of Gun Curious

DREW NELLINS SMITH is the author of Arcade (Unnamed Press, 2016). His nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Believer, Tin House, VICE, and Literary Hub, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas.