A father with Alzheimer’s alone on the farm. A swindling banker. The school bully now grown-up as the local drug dealer. A bleak, fictional town set in eastern Colorado. The “unhomesteading” of the plains. These are all elements of Greg Hill’s new novel East of Denver.
According to 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.” (Read more about the plot and characters).
So far the novel’s garnered a goodreads rating by readers of 3.4 on a five star scale.
Listen to a revealing interview with author Greg Hill by Colorado Public Radio’s Ryan Warner where he explains the importance of the dead cat in the opening line and discusses his plans to return to Joes, CO where he grew up.
The author was also profiled by Weston Phippen of The Denver Post in 2011 after winning the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for general fiction that included a $15,000 advance and a book deal with the Penguin Group, which brought the book to print. Hill mentions that he originally planned the book to be about a zombie attack in eastern Colorado and Phippen notes, “And maybe, in the end, the book really was about a bunch of zombies: about hopeless men wandering around a land they thought they had conquered, wasting their lives on unfulfilled dreams, drugs and the devastation of others.”