Kirkus spotlights a bruising Texas antihero in 'Daytona Teddy Riggs'

Kirkus Reviews is drawing attention to a debut novel that leans into chaos, self-destruction, and uneasy empathy. In its review of Daytona Teddy Riggs, the magazine describes a story set in 1996 Gulf Coast Texas about a once-promising football player who tries to recast himself as a stronger, faster, tougher version of himself — with disastrous results.

At the center is Teddy Riggs, who insists on being called Daytona and likes to sum himself up with the boast, Fastest on the field. Fastest on the road. That nickname is not just vanity. It captures the way he keeps trying to outrun his own life, even after his parents cut him off from the family trust and he ends up back with his grandmother, Granny, who tries to keep him fed with eggs while he feeds an appetite aggravated by the juice. The review makes clear that Teddy’s steroid use is not a background detail but a driving force behind his temper, his physical deterioration, and the many fights that follow him.

Kirkus portrays Teddy as a character in free fall, but not a flat one. His present-day brawls at old athletic fields are paired with flashbacks to earlier incidents that got him banned from multiple gyms in Corpus Christi. Yet the review argues that author Buxton keeps him from becoming merely grotesque by allowing some real development as he sinks. Teddy experiences a sexual awakening, and he begins to glimpse a purpose that is just substantial enough to suggest he might become something other than a cautionary tale. That tension between collapse and growth appears to be one of the book’s main strengths.

The novel’s comic edge comes through most sharply in Teddy’s appetite for excess. Kirkus notes that he tries repeatedly to squeeze money from friends and relatives, often to support enormous fast-food binges. He devours multiple pizzas at a sitting and describes the whole experience as misery, a contradiction that fits the review’s portrait of him as a man who can no longer tell the difference between self-punishment and self-indulgence. Even his schemes have a kind of momentum to them: after meeting a woman named Tammy, he persuades her to go with him to Houston so he can attend a seminar by Pat Dupree, a life-coaching figure dispensing vague motivational language about commitment and desire.

A satire with sympathy

That seminar sequence matters because it shows how easily Teddy falls for schemes that promise reinvention. Dupree’s advice is presented as hollow, but Teddy’s faith in it reveals just how desperate he is for structure, meaning, and a way out of his own mess. According to Kirkus, even after he gets a dose of that spurious guidance, he remains locked into the same reckless pattern. His spiral eventually lands him in prison, where he again relies on family, this time persuading his sister Pam, a veterinarian, to post bail.

Pam’s reaction, as quoted in the review, captures the family’s exhausted knowledge of who Teddy is and what he keeps asking of them. When he offers to pay her back with personal training sessions, she laughs and drives away, leaving him to keep speeding toward what the review calls his unhinged future. That ending suggests the novel is less interested in a clean redemption arc than in the comedy and damage of watching a man continue to confuse motion with progress.

Kirkus places the book in a familiar tradition of loser heroes and damaged charmers, invoking figures from Thelma and Louise to Richard Russo’s Hank Devereaux Jr. But it also suggests that Buxton brings a different tone to the material: part satire, part wake-up call, and, importantly, an openhearted perspective that keeps the reader attached to Teddy even when he is behaving badly. That balance matters in contemporary fiction, where antiheroes can easily become either too cuddly or too repellant. Here, the review argues, the novel finds room for both ridicule and compassion.

The review frames the book as a debut with promise. By emphasizing the author’s ability to let Teddy evolve even in disaster, Kirkus positions Daytona Teddy Riggs as more than a story about steroids, bad choices, and macho posturing. It is also a study of craving: for status, for physical power, for attention, for money, and perhaps, underneath everything else, for a form of dignity Teddy does not know how to ask for directly. In that sense, the novel seems aimed not only at readers who like unruly comic fiction, but also at anyone interested in how American masculinity can warp under pressure and how family can become both a lifeline and a limit.

For now, the review’s central message is straightforward: Teddy Riggs may be headed nowhere good, but Buxton has made his descent lively, human, and memorable enough that readers will want to follow him anyway.