To Kill A Mockingbird collides with Deliverance! "Thornhorn, where the hell have you been?" ~ William Peter Blatty (author of The Exorcist) In the long and jagged shadow of Riddle Top lies a darkling mountain world—-a world of unholy mirth and madness, of gods and demons you never knew existed. Hitch a wild-ass ride with two runaway teens—-the runty but tough preacher's girl Tizzy Polk and her punk boyfriend Matthew. They might think they are Bonnie and Clyde, but they might also race headlong into an evil far greater than their own. They may come to see things darkly different and seldom seen on that bewitched mountain known below as Riddle Top. Take care, folks say in story and song. Watch your step. And beware up there where the wind doth howl like the hellhound electric. Up there, where Tizzy and Matthew come knocking on a strange door. For nobody knows what awaits once you've disturbed your disturbing host. Your hands are in his hands now. And the scariest thing of all? He's got all the time in this world. A Tale Untold by a Riddle Top Magpie Stark, poetic, haunting: Wicked Temper unfolds like a waking fever dream, a rockabilly heart of darkness. The kind you can kill but it don't stop beating. Wicked Temper is the premeditated prequel to Randy Thornhorn's The Kestrel Waters. "One of the South's wildest new voices..." ~ The Oxford American Magazine "Randy Thornhorn is clearly the love child of Sam Shepard and Flannery O'Connor...He isn't just a good writer, he's a GREAT writer. Southern Gothic magic at it's best." ~ Kat Manaan _________________ The Unforeseen Writings of Randy Thornhorn: Where ravenous love and murderous intent festers beneath the Southern skin, searching for release and revelation. Randy Thornhorn unleashes the hellhound electric: grotesque fables, relentless howlings, and touching remnants torn from the heart—gunning up and down the bedeviled backroads run by great Southern Gothic scouts like Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and even Harper Lee. (And recent Southern Gothic travelers like Barry Hannah, Donna Tartt, Mary Ward Brown, Lee Smith, Poppy Z. Brite, John Kennedy Toole, and Cormac McCarthy). Thornhorn braves a spectral, displaced land where bad daddies, careless lovers, and other vampires collide in horror and comic disarray, amidst the ironic human echoes of Mark Twain and Charles Portis. Prepare yourself for demons and gods you never knew existed, where Randy Thornhorn plays the fool and the fool killer, the high lonesome magpie and the boom-chicka-boom. Rest assured. You have never read the like. . . . (sdb)