Emergency Instructions
- $14.95 PaperbackISBN: 978-1-935738-95-4
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Renee Harvell is bewildered by the South. People are named Peck Titsworth, for Christ’s sake, and every curve in the road hides a dead dog or a “Prepare to meet God” or a “Trust The One Who Bled For You” sign. Emergency Instructions opens with the young Harvell family’s arrival in Arkansas during the “summer of death,” and follows their struggle to survive in a place where “practitioners of backwoods witchcraft are as common as Methodists and sometimes one in the same.”
Joey’s been hired as Assistant Professor of History with a specialty in southern conflicts involving Mormons, and Renee teaches special ed at R’Ville Middle. When her life intertwines with Rhonda Love, whose daughter was savagely murdered the summer before, a moment of reckoning flies toward them and their men. Like the far off thrum that ever thumps from the backside of their property, the Harvell’s year in the Natural State takes on a heartbeat all its own. What happens is as unpredictable as the mystery lights that hover above the Ozarks that winter, when country women hang snakes from tree limbs to tease out rain that finally comes gushing. Book one of the Go Love Quartet, Emergency Instructions, plumbs blood ties and roots, our inescapable connectedness to place and kin.
What They’re Saying about Michael Gills
“Michael Gills’ vivid, headstrong characters brim with desire, blame, and—most of all—rich storytelling at its heartiest. Gills writes the saga of the Stepwells with such breadth and depth that their lives seem both historic and intimate…a murderous, tender, swaggering tale that, in the end, is an unwavering argument in favor of love—the uncompromising variety—and Gills is absolutely convincing.”
—Julianna Baggott, author of Girl Talk, The Miss America Family, The Madam
“…Gills now shows himself to be one of our best novelists…worthy of comparison to Faulkner and O’Connor, this is a great novel by a great writer.”
—Eric Miles Williamson, 14 Fictional Positions and Welcome to Oakland
“Gills’ beautifully written prose in White Indians combines his warring natures—the daring macho infused crazy man with the earth-reverent husband and father. This book is a reminder that we Americans still live on a continent that recently was a wilderness, and that we all possess an atavistic need to interact with it. For those of us not so good as Michael Gills at camping, hiking, and white-water rafting, he’s offered us a thrilling armchair version.”
—Diane Wakoski, author The Diamond Dog
“Each word is a spark, every sentence a sizzling fuse. The whole of White Indians is a sun-white conflagration, cleanly and cleansing. The intensity of this visionary memoir is the core of its message. Michael Gills sojourned in the heart of light and he has returned to his home world with that light still clinging to his every utterance. I shall never be the only reader grateful for his revelations—and a little frightened of them.”
—Fred Chappell, Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories
Go Love
White Indians
West
Finisterre
New Harmony