Excerpt from The Nix by Nathan Hill, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The first word comes from reporters on the scene, who call in with cell phones and are put on the air live. They say Packer was at the Conrad Hilton Hotel hosting a dinner and speech. Afterward, he was making his way with his entourage through Grant Park, glad-handing, baby-kissing, doing all your typical populist campaign maneuvers, when suddenly from out of the crowd a person or a group of people began to attack.

"What do you mean attack?" the anchor asks. He sits in a studio with shiny black floors and a lighting scheme of red, white, and blue. His face is smooth as cake fondant. Behind him, people at desks seem to be working. He says: "Could you describe the attack?"

"All I actually know right now," the reporter says, "is that things were thrown."

"What things?"

"That is unclear at this time."

"Was the governor struck by any of the things? Is he injured?"

"I believe he was struck, yes."

"Did you see the attackers? Were there many of them? Throwing the things?"

"There was a lot of confusion. And some yelling."

"The things that were thrown, were they big things or small things?"

"I guess I would say small enough to be thrown."

"Were they larger than baseballs, the thrown things?"

"No, smaller."

"So golf-ball-size things?"

"Maybe that's accurate."

"Were they sharp? Were they heavy?"

"It all happened very fast."

"Was it premeditated? Or a conspiracy?"

"There are many questions of that sort being asked."

A logo is made: Terror in Chicago. It whooshes to a spot next to the anchor's ear and flaps like a flag in the wind. The news displays a map of Grant Park on a massive touch-screen television in what has become a commonplace of modern newscasting: someone on television communicating via another television, standing in front of the television and con-trolling the screen by pinching it with his hands and zooming in and out in super-high definition. It all looks really cool.

While they wait for new information to surface, they debate whether this incident will help or hurt the governor's presidential chances. Help, they decide, as his name recognition is pretty low outside of a rabid conservative evangelical following who just loves what he did during his tenure as governor of Wyoming, where he banned abortion outright and required the Ten Commandments to be publicly spoken by children and teachers every morning before the Pledge of Allegiance and made English the official and only legal language of Wyoming and banned anyone not fluent in English from owning property. Also he permitted firearms in every state wildlife refuge. And he issued an executive order requiring state law to supersede federal law in all matters, a move that amounted to, according to constitutional scholars, a fiat secession of Wyoming from the United States. He wore cowboy boots. He held press conferences at his cattle ranch. He carried an actual live real gun, a revolver that dangled in a leather holster at his hip.

At the end of his one term as governor, he declared he was not running for reelection in order to focus on national priorities, and the media naturally took this to mean he was running for president. He perfected a sort of preacher-­slash-cowboy pathos and an antielitist populism and found a receptive audience especially among blue-collar white conservatives put out by the current recession. He compared immigrants taking American jobs to coyotes killing livestock, and when he did this he pronounced coyotes pointedly with two syllables: ky-oats. He put an r sound in Washington so it became Warshington. He said bushed instead of tired. He said yallow for yellow and crick for creek.

Supporters said that's just how normal, nonelite people from Wyoming talked.

Excerpted from The Nixby Nathan Hill. Copyright © 2016 by Nathan Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.