Tuesday, July 17, 2012

What is Gregory Hill reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Gregory Hill, author of East of Denver.

One book he tagged:
Lethal Injection by Jim Nesbit

One chapter in and I’m already reading this book while walking down the sidewalk. Murder, a death chamber, insanity, nicely composed sentences. For ridiculously brutal and occasionally subtle noir, it’s top of the pops. I picked up Lethal Injection under the false impression that it was written in the 50’s. After that first chapter, I was convinced that Jim Nisbet was the great lost author of the golden age of noir (and also possibly clairvoyant, judging by the predictions he made with respect to death penalty laws). I’ve since discovered that this book was first published in 1987. Now, I’m convinced that I need to...[read on]
About the book, from the publisher:
Mixing pathos and humor in equal measure, East of Denver is an unflinching novel of rural America, a poignant, darkly funny tale about a father and son finding their way together as their home and livelihood inexorably disappears.

When Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams arrives at his family’s farm in eastern Colorado to bury a dead cat, he finds his widowed and senile father, Emmett living in squalor. He has no money, the land is fallow, and a local banker has cheated his father out of the majority of the farm equipment and his beloved Cessna.

With no job and no prospects, Shakespeare suddenly finds himself caretaker to both his dad and the farm, and drawn into an unlikely clique of old high school classmates: Vaughn Atkins, a paraplegic confined to his mother’s basement; Carissa McPhail, an overweight bank teller who pitches for the local softball team; and longtime bully D. J. Beckman, who now deals drugs throughout small-town Dorsey. Facing the loss of the farm, Shakespeare hatches a half-serious plot with his father and his fellow gang of misfits to rob the very bank that has stolen their future.

East of Denver is a remarkably assured, sharply observed, and utterly memorable debut.
Visit the East of Denver website.

Writers Read: Gregory Hill.

--Marshal Zeringue