In East of Denver, a darkly comic tale of disappearing civilization in the modern rural West, wry humor and desperate characters mix in an arid landscape as a family falls apart. Gregory Hill, who works at the University of Denver library, grew up in rural Colorado and displays a keen, at times riveting, understanding of the absurdities and freedoms of small-town isolation and the dying way of life that was once the American standard.
The novel opens with 36-year-old Shakes Williams returning to the family farm in his tiny Colorado hometown to bury his cat. Shakes makes a gruesome discovery that attests to the severity of his widowed father's worsening dementia. He's also alarmed to find the tidy hum of crop cultivation and well-tended machinery that used to be the farm is now a fallow ruin--a demise abetted by the chicanery of a local bank manager. Shakes quits his Denver job to care for his father and to try to resurrect some semblance of the farm. He consequently falls into a sparse, motley social circle of old high school acquaintances whose circumstances are as abject as his own; a half-assed bank robbery plan is soon afoot.
Hill takes a morbid delight in the abasement of his characters, but he never loses track of their essential humanity or the tragedy of their stunted lives. Though the writing occasionally suffers from a choppy, affected cleverness, the fully realized characters, the vivid, harsh imagery and the bleak yet delectable irony make this debut both funny and harrowing. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic