Vroege RecensentenGregory Hill

Liberté Egalité, Sororité

From murder to bear hunts to the deconstruction of the guiding principles of an entire religious sect, Sister Liberty is a fully-fledged revolution. Independent Book Review

The narrative is both whimsical and entertaining, even as it crescendos to a shocking conclusion. Booklife

1885. When murderous circumstances force the widows Annie and Euphémie, and the precocious Auguste, to flee their French village, a quartet of missionaries from the Church of Solemn stow them away withing the Statue of Liberty's head on a steamer that reaches New York after a deadly tempest. From New York, the missionaries usher the refugees to their staid village of Solemn in southern Indiana, where pleasure is forbidden in the name of God.

The villagers embrace the refugees while avoiding certain delicate subjects, such as the relationship between the widows, and Auguste's endless blasphemies.

These delicate subjects become unavoidable when Solemn is tapped to host the All-Tent Revival. The Revival calls itself "a multi-denominational marketplace for God." More accurate would be "a time-bomb composed of two-hundred rival factions of late-19th-century American crack-pot religious sects."

Guess who sets off that bomb.

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Dear Reader: Sister Liberty is a feminist non-romantic/non-erotic book about 19th-century French lesbians trying to survive in a southern Indiana religious cult. It is not whimsical* or cute or quirky. However, it is shrewd, absurd, hilarious, and utterly unconcerned with tropes, genres, commercial success, or the insecurity of zealots.

Please adjust your expectations accordingly.

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*Yes, I know.

Zebra Skin Shirt Ranks with the best of Vonnegut's mind-benders, but with more laughs page-for-page. --Zack Boddicker, Author of The Essential Carl Mahogany Before the clocks stopped, Narwhal Slotterfield was an ordinary basketball referee. He blew his whistle. He stretched the rules. Somehow he kept a girlfriend. But now it’s 7:23 pm in a diner in the middle of the Great Plains and now is all he has. And his next move could decide the fate of a civilization. Left to wander a world where people stand like mannequins and raindrops never reach the earth, the ref soon realizes he has the power to officiate the universe itself. Which is good, since after navigating exploding trucks, magic mushroom farms, and meteorological vortices, he’s got some serious girl problems. With audacious humor, unpredictable turns, and outrageous calls, Zebra Skin Shirt offers a sharply-written speculative walkabout for the literarily adventuresome. Absurd and surreal, without ever crossing the line into silliness, Zebra Skin Shirt is an excellent novel from an author that clearly understands the stupidity, chaos and madness of existence, and isn’t afraid to embrace it all and put it on the page. --Cory Casciato, Suspect Press

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.