Although the extra cash helps keep him solvent, hog farmer Gene Barnes
isn't proud of his role in disposing of the occasional body for an old
Marine buddy mixed up with who knows what. Gene definitely doesn't want
to know and has been warned not to ask. That is, until he recognizes one
of the bodies he's about to feed to the hogs. Now he's got plenty of
questions and none of 'em have good answers. When Gene sets off to find
the truth, he travels a landscape of loss: loss of family, loss of the
American small town, and loss of his own moral compass. From his farm in
Carmi, Illinois, to Metropolis, the home of Superman, he travels through
a Graveyard of the Gods only to discover revenge, and redemption comes
at a high price.
In his debut novel, poet, playwright, and River Styx editor Richard
Newman tells a humdinger of a tale that begins in the cornfields along
the silty banks of the Wabash River and brushes with ghosts of his
family's past, the nursing home where his deranged mother lives, Ohio
River pirates near Cave-in-Rock, and the destruction of the small-town
American and the Midwestern family farm through corporate greed before a
final showdown in Garden of the Gods park of the Shawnee National
Forest.
