The Crawford County Sketchbook

(Paperback)

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Description

The Switchback family has inhabited Crawford County since before the War Between the States, and it has eked out an existence, and even prospered, by virtue of hard work and honesty. Peter Switchback, Jr. is the current inhabitant of the family estate and caretaker of the farm, and in many ways stands as a symbolic paragon of virtue.

The Morgan family has been in Crawford County at least as long as the Switchback family, and has made its way in the world by means of greed, pride, and dishonesty. Sheriff Cecil Morgan is the third in his line to hold his office, and like his ancestors he is an avowed enemy of the Switchback family and all that they stand for.

The life of Crawford County plays out through the course of short tales told by several of its inhabitants, some tragic, some whimsical. The stories wind their way through the lives of Switchback and Morgan, framed by several ponderings of moral philosophy and existence. We are faced with Peter Switchback's obituary on the opening page of the story, and the balance of the pages works its way to that eventual outcome.

Reviews

Grotesque tales of the struggle between good and evil from a dark corner of the American heartland. Poet and surrealist Janikowski (A Martini and a Pen, 2014, etc.) does his best Faulkner impression here, using a blend of baroque Southern classicism and redneck patois to fuel a portrait of his fictional Crawford County, a character-rich settlement somewhere in the rural South. . . . The novel's exaggerated portrayals, distorted narrative threads, and flamboyant brand of Southern Gothic will ring the bells of a certain literary-minded audience.

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Author Bio

Tom Janikowski is a Midwestern author specializing in surrealism and symbolism. His flashes and short stories have appeared online and in print on both sides of the Atlantic. Janikowski is greatly influenced by Lost Generation authors such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, but he also admits long-standing love affairs with the writing of Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike. He currently works, writes, and mixes cocktails in Davenport, Iowa, where he lives with Shelly, his wife of 15 years.