A breezily readable summer novel that not only entertains but also surprises. It explores the dynamics of family relationships without ever stooping to sentimentality, and it's one of this summer's most pleasant surprises. East of Denver is a slow burn, but by the end it’s burning hot: you’ll leave this book a little charred. . . This is writing on a par with that of top-flight black-comic novelists like Sam Lipsyte and Jess Walter, and it deserves to be read.
All the characters are quirky if not downright bizarre and you never really know how things are going to play out. A witty, snarky, and thoroughly enjoyable read. East of Denver is painstakingly funny — the novel offers a deep, dark look into the real life issues that make society uncomfortable. From beginning to end, the novel's great achievement is Hill's gift of characters: people who are often broken, crumbling, and struggling, but always irresistible. What makes [East of Denver] special, and especially powerful, is that Hill, like his damaged characters, has a real talent for fucking everything up.
Gregory Hill...displays a keen, at times riveting, understanding of the absurdities and freedoms of small-town isolation and the dying way of life that was once the American standard. There is pathos. Sadness. Dark glimmers of hope. The entire book reveals this balance and shift and makes it absolutely worthwhile to pick up. Hill has a bright future. [An] agreeable, offbeat debut novel...A story about a father and son who bond against the odds, with an ending as quirkily satisfying as the rest of the book. There’s no fantasy escapism here. It’s real life. And real life is darkly comic.
Hill gives up plenty of laughs to go with the pain...a fine first novel from a writer with a great sense of character Dark humor, zany characters, and a sharp eye for detail distinguish this arch novel set in Colorado’s dying farmland. . . Charming details of rural life are offset by a madcap plot and tragicomic details of dementia, even as father and son share high jinks and man-hugs on their inexorable journey to face the music. An eye for detail, an ear for dialogue, and a knack for story-telling distinguish this unflinching novel of rural America.
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 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. (July)
Suddenly caretaker of his senile father and the family farm in eastern Colorado, to which he has just returned, Stacey "Shakespeare" Williams links up with some old high school buddies and hatches a plan to rob the victimizing local bank. Do they really mean to go through with it? Dark comedy with an in-the-news edge; note that debut novelist Hill works for the University of Denver library.
Fleeing Denver, Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams returns to his family’s farm to bury his cat. He finds his dad, Emmett, alone and suffering from premature dementia. It turns out that Emmett has fallen victim to the town’s predatory banker, and his son may be his only hope. With the farm and his father in jeopardy, “Shakespeare” concocts a plan to partner with a basement-dwelling paraplegic and a self-described “fat anorexic” bank teller to rob the bank. Playing each character of this sorry (though oddly affecting) group of robbers, Joseph Collins is at his best as the scene-stealing Emmett. At times, during dialogue-driven scenes, characters are indistinguishable; however, the bulk of the story rests on Shakespeare’s narrative, for which Collins’s understated delivery is good fit. A.S © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
DECEMBER 2012 - AudioFile
You can go home again, but Lord knows why you'd ever want to. Such is the lesson learned by rural drifter Stacey "Shakespeare" Williams in this agreeable, offbeat debut novel. A deceased cat leads Shakespeare from Denver to his father's farm, where he hopes to find a suitable burial space. Instead, he finds his father deep into senility, not aware that his longtime caretaker recently dropped dead in his bathroom. He's also been swindled by the owner of the local bank, who's already stolen Pa's beloved airplane and is about to foreclose on the farm. Shakespeare settles in for the long haul, and the people he reconnects with--town bully/drug dealer D.J. Beckman and oversexed bank teller Clarissa McPhail--remind him of why he left. But he spends most of the narrative with his father, once a gifted carpenter/inventor and now in the grip of something that looks like Alzheimer's. Hill doesn't soft-pedal the sadness of the situation, even while playing up the father's constant forgetfulness and quick flashes of coherence for their dry and dark humor. Likewise, a subplot about an old classmate who's now paraplegic is neither sentimentalized nor played for cheap laughs. The only hole is that we learn almost nothing of Shakespeare's back story: We find that he is genetically unable to smell, an odd detail that doesn't bear on the plot, but never find out what he did for a living. Shakespeare eventually decides that his best option is an unrealistic plan to rob the bank; whether he'll go through with it is a running question throughout the book. A story about a father and son who bond against the odds, with an ending as quirkily satisfying as the rest of the book.
