250 PAGES
©2015
Alternating Current

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As Faulkner’s voice portrayed the South and Breece D’J Pancake’s represented Appalachia, Eric Shonkwiler captures the Midwest, with this collection of novellas and short stories that peels back the edges of rural existence to expose the heart of it. Through parental neglect, rebellious sons and daughters, drug-addled war veterans, backwoods zombies, injured firemen, car thieves, witch doctors, and Navajo ghosts, Shonkwiler brings you a disregarded world you can no longer ignore—one thriving with the mundane, the bruised, the unheard. Here is the voice of the rest of us, spoken only the way firsthand experience, rooted deep in overworked soil, can say it. 

“Sometimes it’s bad decisions; other times it’s just trying to stamp out an existence the only way a person knows how, but the stories within are enough to make most men cry. Shonkwiler has an eye for detail and a lot of heart that he places in each and every sentence to make his words leap from the page and stay with you long after they’ve been read.” — Frank Bill, author of Donnybrook and Crimes in Southern Indiana

“God bless the hardscrabble elegance of Eric Shonkwiler’s prose. These stories turn strangers into familiar faces. Battered souls and stoic hearts. Revenge, redemption, mercy. It’s all here for the asking, like an emotional fire sale.Moon Up, Past Full wrings every last emotion out of your heart, but still leaves it full. Quite the magic trick. Comparisons don’t come easy with Shonkwiler’s work. Few others measure up.” — Anthony Breznican, author of Brutal Youth