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The People of the Broken Neck

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WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:

“A searing debut novel: terse sentences juxtaposed with ambiguous, surreal descriptions of violence and the after-effects of trauma. … A literary thriller somewhere between Phil Klay and Dennis Lehane.” — Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions,

“Silas Dent Zobal has written an exquisitely rare novel, at once a page-turning thriller and a meticulously crafted work of literary art.” — North American Review

“A tour de force of a debut novel, which blends elements of mainstream thriller, noir fiction, preternatural mystery, and travelogue. … Powered by rich imagery, darkly lyrical prose, and a deeply philosophical undertone, this novel explores the nature of family—particularly when those familial bonds begin breaking—with profoundly moving conclusions.” Publishers Weekly, starred review

“America’s Gogol.” — Claire Vaye Watkins

“Silas Dent Zobal’s The People of the Broken Neck is one of those rare hybrids: a thriller and a deeply philosophical novel, a novel so finely attuned to the dark currents of human love and aggression that it touches those wellsprings that lie beneath the human.  Beautiful and hard, Zobel’s prose is like a newly-cleaned rifle.” — John Vernon

It’s a rare novel that combines consistently stunning literary prose with the heart-stopping pace of a thriller, but that’s exactly what Silas Dent Zobal has accomplished here. As the action zig-zags from Pennsylvania to Maine to Washington State, the novel evokes an American landscape that amazes with its beauty even as its enormity crushes the singular goal of the novel’s protagonist, a Veteran running from his violent past while keeping his two children close. Exquisite sentences demanded that I stop and pay attention even as I was propelled to quickly turn pages as the action of this incredible story raced toward its inevitably tragic conclusion.
— Kim van Alkemade, New York Times bestselling author of Orphan #8

“I am a forever fan of Silas Dent Zobal, a direct descendant of the great stylists and provocateurs of arts and letters.” — Claire Vaye Watkins

SILAS DENT ZOBAL

THE PEOPLE OF THE BROKEN NECK

From the woods where he hides with his nearly grown son Clarke and his young daughter King, ex-Army Ranger Dominick Sawyer watches Agent Charlie Basin’s flashlight beam bounce on the walls inside his cabin. Dom’s wife is missing. His post-trauma hallucinations rip at him explosively and bring him to his knees. And a local deputy sheriff is dead. When the FBI agents recede into the night, the Sawyers begin to run, across the country in stolen trucks, leaving a trail of blood behind them. Together with a young girl they pick up on the road, they hope to run until they find a peaceable place in the American Northwest.

But Agent Basin sees his own troubled family reflected in Dom’s haunted existence, and his pursuit is relentless.

All any of them want is to spirit King away to someplace safe.

All she wants is not to be afraid of her father and to find out why her mother disappeared.

BOOK INFORMATION

$16.95 | Paperback | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 352 pages

October 2016

ISBN: 978-1-60953-134-8 | Carton Quantity: 24

EISBN: 978-1-60953-135-5

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READ EXCERPT

AT NIGHT THE TILLED EARTH looked like a black lake. A stand of trees sheltered on the near side of the field and on the far side was a log cabin. The long branches of the trees leaned against the ground and something as dark as oil dripped from their tips. When the halogen lights began to sweep the inside of the cabin, the father did not rise from where he hunkered between his daughter and his son beneath the hollow pine. On each of them he rested one of his hands. The ground beneath them was still stiff with late-March cold and the scent of wood smoke drifting from their cabin smelled like his children’s sleeping skins.
Down the hill, past the line of willows and the hollow pine and the plum tree, the Susquehanna River coiled like a black rope. Above them something moved in the branches. Something that moved quickly with unseen claws scraping against unseen bark. The wind brushed dead leaves off the ground, and the moon came and went, and the blossoms of the plum tree lifted and settled again like a thousand shushing tongues.
The cabin’s screen door opened and closed with a metallic crack and two man-shaped shadows stumbled forward as though tethered to the narrow ends of their beams of light. A crackle of static on a handheld radio. The distance between the father’s ear and the log cabin stripped away the particulars of enunciation, the likely raised vowels of easterners, and what was left was pared down to the bark of anger in a man’s voice. Bootfall against stone. Headlamps appeared and a guttural engine sparked to life as if it was inside his chest, and then the gravel lane pattered and cracked behind the wheels and the headlamps circled back toward the dark, flat line of the road.
The father said the names of his children to himself under his breath. A kind of incantation to keep them safe. The older, the boy, he called “Clarke.” The younger, the girl, “King,” short for Kingsley. The cuneiform of his two kids in their downy sleeping bags looked sunken in rather than risen up. Like impressions in the ground.


NOTHING HERE. The first man into the cabin had known it from the start. Empty. He swung his halogen flashlight back and forth. There was nothing. He lightfooted through the dining room. A table and four chairs. A clock on the wall that did not keep time. A second man shadowed the first like an obedient dog. They rifled the medicine cabinet, then the first man stopped in the center of the living room and listened. Again, nothing. It was a small house. A cabin. He touched the black woodstove. Still warm. He wiped the sweat from his lips. He was tired of hunting men who’d mucked up their lives, who’d done things wrong. He played the light around the children’s room. Unmade bunks. Baseball gloves. Sock monkeys. A worn doll. Spine-snapped books on a shelf of cement block and pine two-by-sixes. The first man put one hand to his neck. His skin felt hot enough to mold into a new shape. He wanted to go home to his wife and their cool sheets and their new bed. He opened the refrigerator in the kitchen. The second man leaned over him, breathing heavily. Two hot dogs. Leftover macaroni and cheese, no mold. No hot dog buns. His nylon jacket swished as he turned. The second man scrambled back, his shoe slipping on the vinyl floor. The second man fell sideways until the first man reached out to catch him by his forearm. Still, the second man’s upper lip caught the corner of the countertop. The flesh split. When the second man straightened, the first man shook his head. One drop of dark blood fell. Two drops of blood. The first man stepped out on the porch and looked out. His flashlight petered into the darkness. The night was like a foreign sound. He put his hands in the pockets of his nylon jacket. “Let’s go,” he said to the second man. “There’s nothing here.”

THE AUTHOR

Silas Dent Zobal

Silas Dent Zobal is the author of a collection of stories, The Inconvenience of the Wings — which was named by Kirkus one of the “Best Indie Books of 2015.”  He has published short fiction in the Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, New Orleans Review, North American Review, Green Mountain Review, Shenandoah, Wisconsin Review, and elsewhere. He has won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, been a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and been awarded a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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