Eric Shonkwiler

As Faulkner’s voice portrayed the South and Breece D’J Pancake’s represented Appalachia, Eric Shonkwiler captures the Midwest, with this collection of novellas and short stories that peels back the edges of rural existence to expose the heart of it. Through parental neglect, rebellious sons and daughters, drug-addled war veterans, backwoods zombies, injured firemen, car thieves, witch doctors, and Navajo ghosts, Shonkwiler brings you a disregarded world you can no longer ignore—one thriving with the mundane, the bruised, the unheard. Here is the voice of the rest of us, spoken only the way firsthand experience, rooted deep in overworked soil, can say it.