Book review: "Mud Season" by Jeff Kramer

 If you're intending to read Jeff Kramer's 2025 debut novel "Mud Season," I have advice: Once you start, read it as fast as possible.

That's because "Mud Season" has a lot of characters — and importantly, it has many similar characters. Reading the book swiftly will help you keep the characters straight. This isn't a big ask, really, because the book is so enjoyable you'll probably want to keep going.

The character similarity is by design. "Mud Season" tells the story of an angst-ridden writer whose new novel features characters that seem a lot like people he knows, prompting readers to rush to troubling conclusions and alarming his in-laws, who feel the book is demonizing them.

For every major character in the main story there is a similar character in the book within the book. Protagonist Woody Hackworth is an embittered journalist and so is the lead character in his book, Cus Stanston (though Woody conveniently makes his doppelganger taller and more handsome). 

Woody has a flirtatious relationship with a woman named Celeste;  Cus has an extramarital affair with a woman named Aurora. 

Most importantly, Woody makes the chief villain of his novel Cus's father-in-law, the head of a concrete company, causing readers to assume he's referring to his own father-in-law, the head of an excavation and demoliton company.

Even the book titles are similar: The book within "Mud Season" is called "Fear as Mud."

Yes, it's a tangled web, but it's also a fun one — a clever, witty, entertaining ride filled with humor and unexpected twists. This is defintely not a cookie-cutter plot. 

(It's worth noting that the book has not just two levels, but three. Author Jeff Kramer, like Woody and Cus, is a journalist. Like his characters, Kramer lives in upstate New York. And Kramer's father-in-law was the owner of a roofing company).

In Woody Hackworth, Kramer has an unusual protagonist. Woody is a sad sack filled with an anxieties and an inferiority complex, so compelled to prove himself by writing a successful book that he seems ready to torpedo his marriage, fracture his relationship with his daughter and make enemies of his in-laws. He's not really likeable, but in his confused selfishness he is, somehow, lovable. 

One of the most unique elements of "Mud Season" is the way it gives readers a glimpse into a writer's mind. Kramer smartly has Woody releasing his novel as a serial, publishing one chapter at a time online while he's still writing the rest. 

This means that the writing — and rewriting —  of "Fear as Mud" is intertwined with the plot. Kramer shows how a writer considers word and phrase choices, character arcs and story logic. Woody ponders whether "fruition" is the right word to use in a sex scene, how evil to make the wife in his story, and how much "ethnic" background to add to his characters when he realizes the story is filled with white people. 

All writers experience this sort of mental gymnastics, but it's often hard to show it. Kramer makes it tangible, and you can imagine the parallel with his own internal debates as he wrote "Mud Season". 

The book is dotted with humor and snark, some of it delivered off-hand and quickly while the plot moves on. At one point, Woody bungles the title of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" as "The Mason Jar." In another scene, listening to a doctor describe a character's brain tumor, Woody's mind drifts away, imaging an auto mechanic. "He might as well be saying Joe's brake pads are down to 20% and there's a recall on his electronic ignition shift."

Kramer is careful to make the book within the book — the novel by Woody Hackworth — slightly clumsily written. It opens with, "It wasn't a particularly stormy night, but it was definitely dark, dark as the ink drying on the latest scoop of the best all-around reporter at the Tiberius Daily Informer."

Later, when Cus and Aurora are having sex, the book describes "great rockets of passion and liftoff became imminent." In a different scene, the fawning Aurora wonders about Cus, "Was there nothing her dashing defender of Earth and sky didn't know?"

Like I said, this is a fun read.