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A country woman makes a Sophie’s Choice regarding her family’s survival. A smalltown marshal hunts his own son for murder. A former football hero lives in the shadow of a brutal, decades-old locker room ritual. A car salesman injures his granddaughter in a moment of drunkenness and must face truths about his essential self.

Ferocious and real, the fourteen tales in Bob Johnson’s blistering debut explore the undertow of violence and sin along the St. Lawrence Divide in northern Indiana, where men, women, and children struggle to find their way in the darkness…of the divide.

Praise & Reviews                                                                                 

“In THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, Bob Johnson brings storytelling back to its roots, with precisely drawn characters mucking around in the deep chasms between freedom and safety, tradition and progress, and individualism and community. You might need a breather between stories, but you’ll keep returning to these Alice Munro-esque depictions of heartbreaking humanity in a broken but beautiful world.”
—Susanna Daniel, author of Stiltsville and Sea Creatures  

“The Continental Divide is a riveting, powerful, literary debut, and Bob Johnson is my new favorite writer. From the first story to the last, he has his foot on the gas and never lets up.”
—Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff

“Recalling Flannery O’Connor in its merciless judgment and surprising grace, The Continental Divide maps the American Midwest in new and unsettling ways. With quiet lyricism and great precision, Bob Johnson reveals to us the brutal beauties of the human heart. Riveting, chilling, the stories in this masterful collection will startle, unsettle, and amaze you. Johnson is an astonishingly gifted writer. Shockingly good.”
—EJ Levy, author of The Cape Doctor 

“A dynamite collection. Johnson’s Mount Moriah is at once mythical in scope and powerfully earthy and granular in its rendering – a threshing ground where no space is safe, and everything is the opposite of copacetic, and the soft, lonely spaces of the soul struggle to wriggle free of their violent, often nihilistic entrapments. The dramatic tension on the page is so visceral and intense it makes your hands tremble.”
—Robert Cohen, author of Amateur Barbarians

“To borrow a phrase from William Carlos Williams' poetry, “the pure products of America go crazy” in these stories, whose narrative acceleration is the literary equivalent of a souped-up car. The characters here are often desperate and on-the-run from something, and that "something" usually catches up to them and overtakes them. Forget anything you thought you knew about the Midwest—these stories will set you straight.”
—Charles Baxter, National Book Award Finalist

“Bob Johnson understands angry men and the damage they do, especially in fits of jealousy or revenge-seeking. These hard-wrought stories chart a course through a richly textured world of bullies, ex-cons, wise guys, psychotics, crooked cops, abusive churchmen, exhausted women, and confused kids. Johnson’s clear-eyed sensibility and honest prose show us where the trouble starts and why it’s so hard to find a happy ending that doesn’t include violence.” 
—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of The Waters

“Johnson’s stories are so complex, so powerful, that from the first line you know you’re going to be shaken to your core. This is the Midwest no one talks about. This is the Midwest I know well. There’s not a collection out there like this.”
—Erika Wurth, author of White Horse