The City of Hate, the city that titles Timothy S. Miller’s forthcoming novel, is Dallas. It’s a relatively modern version. Dealey Plaza buzzes with tourists come to see the Sixth Floor Museum and relive the events of President Kennedy’s assassination, but this Dallas still has answering machines, printed glossy photographs, and storefront bookstores as (mostly) viable business models. More striking, though, is the emptiness within this busy, thriving city. It’s not the buzzing, numb kind of empty, but an emptiness that writhes and howls and demands to be filled. We walk the streets of Dallas in the shoes of Hal Scott, a cynical, triggered alcoholic clinging to sobriety by his fingernails. Hal, himself empty, fills up his inner monologue with paranoid speculations of other people’s lives. But his perspective isn’t sound. Sometimes, it causes him to miss the truths/connections right in front of him. Sometimes, it’s as if he wants to miss them. We go with him to AA meetings and see other empty people who tried to fill their own voids with alcohol. It doesn’t work. Neither does sex, though plenty try that, too, from the upper echelons of political power to the seedy hotels where prostitutes turn tricks continue...