Strattford County

It's 1975. Johnny Riles leads a lonesome, whiskey-soaked existence on Colorado's high prairie. Abandoned by his parents, who moved away after Johnny accidentally shot his father, and absent his buffoonish younger brother, who has left home to star in the American Basketball Association, Johnny is an uncommonly unhappy man. Johnny is awoken from a depressive stupor after an autumn snowstorm leads him to cross paths with a brutal killer. Thus do his trials begin. The hunt for the killer splinters Johnny's psyche into dangerous and bizarre shards, driving him to beneath the stark western landscape- both literally and figuratively- to unearth the truths behind his nightmares, to search for vengeance, to bargain for his brother's soul, and to plead for a sober reason to live.

A psychedelic tale of adventure and love unfolding on Hill's beloved Eastern Colorado Plains. Our hero and narrator, Narwhal Slotterfield, treks through tornadoes, gutted homesteads and survivalist compounds all while navigating an alternative time/space reality. He's on a journey of self-discovery that resonates as an experimental love song to rural culture on the plains. --Richard Saxton, M12 Studio Director and Professor University of Colorado Boulder

When Shakespeare Williams returns to his family's farm in eastern Colorado to bury his dead cat, he finds his widowed and senile father Emmett living in squalor. He has no money, the land is fallow, and a local banker has cheated his father out of the majority of the farm equipment and his beloved Cessna. With no job and no prospects, Shakespeare suddenly finds himself caretaker to both his dad and the farm and drawn into an unlikely clique of old high school Vaughn Atkins, a paraplegic confined to his mother's basement, Carissa McPhail, an overweight bank teller who pitches for the local softball team, and longtime bully D.J. Beckman, who now deals drugs throughout small-town Dorsey. Facing the loss of the farm, Shakespeare hatches a half-serious plot with his father and his fellow gang of misfits to rob the very bank that has stolen their future. Mixing pathos and humor in equal measure, Gregory Hill's "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