Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family’s entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. No good can come of it. Or can it?In the gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy with a healthy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, the Jewetts and the Fiddlers will find their lives colliding in increasingly dark and horrific ways, placing Donald Ray Pollock firmly in the company of the genre’s literary masters.

    These poems stare down fear from the inside, and ask what it means to walk straight into a splintering world both profane and sacred.

    Makes it hurt true. Hell of a crash.”—Jedidiah Ayres, author of Peckerwood“I’ve written that a way to judge the health of a genre is to gauge the number of emerging young, good writers. Kristopher Triana is one of the newest bumper crop of good ones. I read a couple of his short stories after meeting him at the recent StokerCon. His prose is excellent, his plots compelling. The Ruin Season has these same qualities. Kris has the Write Stuff. Check out a rising star.”—Gene O’Neill, author of The Cal Wild Chronicles and Entangled Soul with Chris Marrs“The Ruin Season is like the literary equivalent of Springsteen’s classic Nebraska. It’s a book with a stripped back feel, brooding with raw emotion and atmosphere where Triana allows his characters to bare their souls and bleed onto every page.”—Adrian Shotbolt, BeavistheBookheadJake Leonard has more than his share of trouble.He’s close to forty now and still suffers from bipolar disorder and the painful memories of the psychotic episodes that derailed his life and sent him behind bars as a youth. He lives in the rural south where he spends his days breaking horses and his nights training dogs in solitude. His nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Nikki, is the daughter of the sheriff, and she’s just getting worse with drugs, alcohol and satanic metal, eventually leading into heroin and low-budget porn. When Jake reconnects with his ex-wife, things get even more complicated, and the limits of love and sanity get pushed to the breaking point.The Ruin Season is a haunting, violent tale of a mentally ill man struggling in a violent and heartless world. It is the story of unrequited love, mad rage, and bloody revenge. It moves forward in the dark style of gritty southern gothic novels, in the tradition of Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Daniel Woodrell, Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Conner. It shows both the tender and horrible sides of insanity as well as the seedy underbelly of the American, backwoods suburbs.

    The dying days of World War I, the Spanish flu devastates the small town of Incarnation, Texas. The sheriff closes the church and quarantines the dying in the schoolhouse. The townsfolk huddle alone in their houses to avoid infection. Each new day brings fresh corpses.But something worse than the flu is coming. Verge Strömberg, son of the domineering town pastor, is a sickly boy who lives in a world of books. His mother disappeared when he was seven, his older brother ran away. Now his father leaves him to tend a church in another county. That’s when the Muladona begins to visit him. Every night, the Muladona, a doomed soul transformed into the Devil’s mule, visits Verge and forces him to listen to a horrific tale. Each night, as Verge huddles under his bed sheets, the monster’s supernatural tales tear his soul apart. Verge’s search for the demonic creature’s true identity leads him through the dark history of Incarnation, from the murder of the Indians by the Spanish settlers, to the disappearance of his mother. In the end, Verge will have to confront the Muladona alone to rescue the memory of his mother and to save his immortal soul.

    In the days before the Civil War, Sam Lock keeps the peace as the town sheriff, like his father before him.That peace is shattered during a raging winter storm when a boy goes missing at Evermore, the sprawling estate of Horace Crownhill and his family. Racing against time and the elements, Sam must mount a desperate search for the child—but what he finds in the snow, and the dark halls of Evermore, are madness ... and murder.As Sam searches for truth in a house poisoned by mysteries and haunted by ghosts, he hopes to weather the storm, but the harrowing secrets he uncovers may prove too terrible to bear. Will he escape with his sanity intact or will the dark presence rumored to hold sway over Evermore claim him as another sacrifice?

    Hartness, author of The Black Knight Chronicles Delaney Green is one of them that don't burn. Possessed of the Touch - with the ability to not only see the future but manipulate it - she's been kept in an institution for most of her life. When the Salesman, a murderous entity with a connection to Delaney's past, starts burning girls to death, FBI Agent Percival Cox gives her the chance to leave the asylum behind. But he presents an even greater threat and she must risk flesh and bone in order to keep him from becoming a Power more destructive than the Salesman.