East of Denver
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
When Shakespeare Williams returns to his family’s farm in eastern Colorado to bury his 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.
Mixing pathos and humor in equal measure, Gregory Hill’s 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his promising debut, Hill wrings lightness from a hopeless situation. Stacey "Shakespeare" Williams returns to the eastern Colorado farmland of his childhood and discovers that his widower father's senility has worsened. Inside a locked bathroom, Emmett Williams's elderly caretaker is "dead, fat, bloated." So Shakes moves in to look after his ailing pa, who, though he sold his Cessna to a local banker for $20 and neglected to renew the government relief lease on his land, still has a knack for mechanics and witty one-upmanship. This, as well as the duo's small triumphs in the garden, misadventures on a homemade motorcycle, and visits to a "fat, naked paraplegic" sustain their spirits. But bills mount and foreclosure looms, and Shakes's high school buddies devise a plan: rob a bank with Emmett as safecracker. Though Shakes's psychic paralysis is palpable, it's hard to understand when he admits, "I didn't want to call for help." If Shakes revealed what stalled his life's takeoff back in Denver before his parents were ill it might be clearer why he refuses to look for at least one parachute during his father's nosedive.
