Book Review: Yeehaw Junction by Kayli Scholz (2025)
Deep in the wilds of Florida lies the shitsplat town of Yeehaw Junction. Abandoned by God (no, really—there aren’t any churches), its foremost landmark is a burned-out diner called Stickey’s, located beneath a strip club. In the parking lot are Skeet, a twelve-year-old aspiring school shooter, and Cricket, a luckless middle-aged woman whose biggest concern is what kind of cake she’ll get for Survivor's Day. The two are hawking jars of DDT-tainted earth to tourists and truckers, part of the motley group of orphans and cast-offs who live in Trudy McLeod’s crusted-over trailer.
Though none of them know it yet, their lives are about to take on a new purpose: a young girl named Heather has recently vanished from a nearby gas station, and there's a sizable reward for anyone who finds her—dead or alive. Being intimately familiar with the seedy, stained underbelly of their town, Trudy and her misfit band of survivors decide to make it their mission to find her.
“Radium and lead in a youngblood’s head.”
You probably already know if you're in or out on Yeehaw Junction. This is one of those dark, chicken-fried Southern noir stories, filled with people too impossible to believe unless you’ve spent time being poor in the American South. If you have, these people feel all too real. The novel does an exceptional job of capturing the nihilistic tone that permeated American culture in the late 1990s, and our primary perspective character, Skeet, channels both that era and its darker emotional undercurrents with startling authenticity.
Though only twelve, Skeet has little interest in anything beyond making money, showing contempt, and meeting Marilyn Manson. Occasionally, we glimpse something in him that might have grown into decency under different circumstances—but mostly, he feels like a tragic story that should probably be put down.
Author Kayli Scholz truly nails the style, pacing, and emotional resonance needed to pull off a story like this. I was deeply engaged from the first chapter, and was wanting more of this world by the time the novel was done. Not everyone can handle the specific tonal balancing act required for something this tragicomic, but Scholz pulls it off with rare skill. She injects her characters with enough humanity to make them unexpectedly sympathetic, even when they’re behaving in ways that are genuinely awful. It’s a distinctly American novel—and a successful one at that.
“It’s just the way life is sometimes; you’re not wanted at the diner downstairs from the titty bar.”
That said, Yeehaw Junction is not going to be for everyone. There’s an extensive content warning at the start (immediately following an epigraph from Aileen Wuornos), and sensitive readers should know they’re in for some gnarly territory. Some chapters lean heavily into a dark, caustic cynicism that offers little comfort or redemption. But within that darkness, there’s real artistry to be found. The novel is exquisitely paced, thematically coherent, and often stunning in its commitment to showing a world most people don’t want to look at. I now happily count myself among Scholz’s fans and can’t wait to see what she does next.
If you're comfortable exploring the elements I've described—and if you can find humanity and existential weight in the ugliness that defines certain corners of Florida—it’s hard to find a better novel in this space than Yeehaw Junction.
Score: 8.8
Strengths:
Well-written
Emotionally effective
Genuinely funny in moments
Weaknesses
At one-hundred-and-eighty pages, the story can only do so much
Not for everyone (just cool people)
Readers from outside North America may struggle to connect
You may also like: Backwaters by Lee Rozelle, True Detective, Kentucky Route Zero, the Yeehaw Junction Wikipedia page.
