The Crawford County Sketchbook

by Tom Janikowski

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597095334
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	08/15/2015
Edition description:	1
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Readers of Tom Janikowski’s remarkable The Crawford County Sketchbook will be reminded of other fictional towns and territories—Winesburg, Ohio, and Yoknapatawpha County, to name just two—but his characters are funnier than Sherwood Anderson’s and less anguished than Faulkner’s. Janikowski has created an original world and brought it to life in a rich, perfectly tuned vernacular.”

—Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948, White Crosses, Laura, and Let Him Go

Editorial 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.”

—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2015-06-08
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 book is composed of three primary sections. The first is devoted to the death of Peter Switchback Jr., an honorable man and local farmer who is revealed in an obituary to have died an untimely death at the age of 43. Janikowski plays out the story of Switchback's life and death in 36 vignettes told from the point of view of various denizens of the community. These largely forgettable characters are merely here to serve as the chorus in a play in which someone is as likely to ruminate on chicken-fried steak or goings-on at the local swimmin' hole as to give insights into horrific farming accidents or tragic suicides. The novel does offer up a genuine black-hat villain in the person of Sheriff Cecil Morgan, a "damned stupid pus-jacketed skin-eater," whose family members play the McCoys to the Switchbacks' Hatfields in their longtime feud. The second novella-length section, "Wild Torrent," falls closer to Of Mice and Men (1937) with its story of an altercation between two men on a farm, one that also ends badly for everyone involved. It all wraps up with a surrealist fiction about Ashley, the virtuous woman who loved Peter Switchback and longs to rewrite his sad ending. The novel's exaggerated portrayals, distorted narrative threads, and flamboyant brand of Southern Gothic will ring the bells of a certain literary-minded audience, but more casual readers may find it a bit rich for their tastes. An elaborate morality play set among the cult of Southerners and their haunted landscapes.

Kirkus Reviews