|
The new novel from acclaimed young
novelist Tristan Egolf, the author of Lord of the Barnyard,
is the story of a community in Pennsylvania terrorized by
an Amish teenage werewolf—and a wildly imaginative tale that
recalls young Kurt Vonnegut.
Tristan Egolf was one of our most talented
young writers—a ferociously witty writer with an absolutely
original imagination, whose novels Lord of the Barnyard
and Skirt and the Fiddle were widely acclaimed. His
new novel is a book about the return of an old curse—the Kornwolf,
a ferocious werewolf whose nocturnal rampaging becomes increasingly
impossible to ignore.
Kornwolf is a book about not being
able to keep a good Amish werewolf down. It takes the reader
for a good old-fashioned romp in the stubble—a journey through
the slums and honky tundra of rural Pennsylvania farmland,
where nothing quite passes for good or bad, sublime or dismal,
discrete or brash: just “solid, implacable, unbroken gray.”
And then the monotony breaks. Something—a freak of
creation—is running amok in the fields. To solve the mystery,
three generations of prodigal sons—a writer and hometown boy
who swore he'd never come back to Penn’s Woods; a middle-aged
former pugilist who runs a decrepit boxing gym; and a misfit,
mute, beaten-down Amish boy about to become a man—are brought
together by the light of a blue moon, in a town called Blue
Ball. Kornwolf is a book about Rumspringa, fisticuffs,
homecomings, alienation, and Amish whiskey ministers, as seen
through the eyes of a young man who finds himself inexplicably
waking up nude in the fields every morning.
A masterfully orchestrated, hilarious,
and compelling take on the classic horror yarn on one level,
Kornwolf layers in social satire of suburban sprawl,
closed minds, and all manners and varieties of self-satisfaction—Amish,
civilian, or. . . other—in the best tradition of Tom
Robbins and George Saunders.
|
