Crooked

Told in the first person by Richard Nixon, this alternative history reworks the Cold War and the Watergate years as a hidden struggle against supernatural forces. The narrator is the thirty-seventh president, whose career stretched from the conformist 1950s through the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. He confronted the Soviets, the Chinese, and eventually his own government, and his fall from shrewd political operator to public laughingstock still puzzles observers.

The novel promises to reveal what Nixon hid: an uncanny secret he stumbled onto as a young man, the real story behind the Cold War, and what really happened during the Watergate cover-up. It asks whether the country's most disliked president was instead a central figure in a fight between everyday life and horrors from another reality, and whether that makes him its greatest.

The book blends Lovecraftian dread, international espionage, and Soviet honey traps. Alongside the political plot runs a presidential marriage whose private conflicts and long battles of endurance amount to a heroic story of their own. The result is part character study and part tense, Faustian thriller.