Kornwolf

Tristan Egolf was one of our most talented young authors--a ferociously witty writer with an absolutely original imagination, whose novels Lord of the Barnyard and Skirt and the Fiddle were widely acclaimed. His new novel is a book about the return of an old curse--the Kornwolf, a ferocious were-wolf whose nocturnal rampaging becomes increasingly impossible to ignore. Kornwolf is a book about not being able to keep a good Amish werewolf down. It takes the reader for an old-fashioned romp in the stubble--a journey through the slums and honky tundra of rural Pennsylvania farmland, where nothing quite passes for good or bad, sublime or dismal, discrete or brash: just "solid, implacable, unbroken gray." And then the monotony breaks. Something--a freak of creation--is running amok in the fields. To solve the mystery, three generations of prodigal sons--a writer and hometown boy who swore he'd never come back to Penn's Woods; a middle-aged former pugilist who runs a decrepit boxing gym; and a misfit, mute, beaten-down Amish boy about to become a man--are brought together by the light of a blue moon, in a town called Blue Ball. Kornwolf is a book about Rumspringa, fisticulffs, homecomings, alienation, and Amish whiskey ministers, as seen through the eyes of a young man who finds himself inexplicably waking up nude in the fields every morning. A masterfully orchestrated, hilarious, and compelling take on the classic horror yarn on one level, Kornwolf layers in social satire of suburban sprawl, closed minds, and all manners and varieties of self-satisfaction--Amish, civilian, or ... other--in the best tradition of Tom Robbins and George Saunders.