Rick Voorhees weaves myths, jokes, and misbehaving deities and mortals together into stories that dare to ask: what happens when Odin meets zoning laws, or when tricksters find themselves stuck in divorce court. He is amused by bureaucracy, stink-eye colonialism, and our habit of inventing spiritual betters.
Once upon a time, Voorhees was an award-winning higher ed author and researcher. Then he decided that academia had enough footnotes and faculty committee meetings without him, and he set off to write about a bigger mess: the unvarnished human predicament.
Raised on the Standing Rock, Rosebud, and Fort Berthold reservations in the Dakotas, his early life was a mix of rez basketball, BIA schoolrooms, traditional dances, rural monotony, and earned respect for kinship seldom encountered in a America’s worldview. It also taught him how to spot a fraud from fifty paces.
His debut novel, The Sacred Clown’s Modern West Trilogy, is a sharp blend of Indigenous deities, Norse gods, spiritual archetypes, middling mortals, all presided over by the Sacred Clown. With the clown’s narrating, curating, and heckling, Voorhees builds a satirical tapestry where myth and history square off in a fandango—and where the border between the sacred and profane collapses.
Every trilogy is said to have three parts. This novel leans in to that. The first story, Rez Ball Gods, starts with the legendary theft of a high school championship trophy and sprawls into a sixty-year saga of flooded farmland, displaced natives, large scale rural electrification, a celebration of passive/aggressive culture, and basketball dreams played out in rez time. Sitting Bull’s Mutual Funds is the second story and drags readers from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to robber barons, Amazonian magic, and the chaos of modern tribal politics—equal parts tragedy, comedy, and spiritual portfolio management. The Pecos Poet closes the trilogy by dropping truth bombs wrapped in biting poems, pseudo-government programs, and caustic humor—like a coyote teaching birthing workshops at the local YMCA. All is well until he decides to run for office.
Early reviews suggest that Voorhees sketches dialogue like a screenwriter, maps mythic frameworks like a professor of religion, and frames satire either like a seasoned critic or a trained carpenter. People who have read him say Rick is great at pulling in readers alongside with dialogue, constructing narratives using old myths, and targeting those problems in society that won’t solve themselves.
