Kornwolf: A Novel

Tristan Egolf

Dec 2007 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

About this ebook

Tristan Egolf's new novel is a book about the return of an old curse — the Kornwolf, a ferocious werewolf whose nocturnal rampaging becomes increasingly impossible to ignore. Kornwolf takes the reader for a good old-fashioned romp in the stubble — a journey through the slums and honky tundra of rural Pennsylvania, where nothing quite passes for good or bad, sublime or dismal, discrete or brash. And then the monotony breaks. Something — a freak of creation — is running amok in the fields. To solve the mystery, three generations of prodigal sons — a writer and hometown boy who swore he'd never come back to Penn's Woods; a middle-aged former pugilist who runs a decrepit boxing gym; and a misfit, mute, beaten-down Amish boy — are brought together by the light of a blue moon, in a town called Blue Ball. On one level this is a masterfully orchestrated, hilarious, and compelling take on the classic horror yarn, on another, Kornwolf is a social satire of suburban sprawl, closed minds, and all manners and varieties of self-satisfaction — Amish, civilian, or... other — in the best tradition of Tom Robbins and George Saunders.

About the author

Tristan Egolf was the author of Lord of the Barnyard and Skirt and the Fiddle. His novels were translated into many foreign languages. He resided in Paris, Amsterdam, rural Kentucky, Oxford, MS, Philadelphia, New York City, and Cape Cod, among other places, and worked as a dog walker, gorilla-suited singing-telegramist, busker, dishwasher, frontman of a band, and booking agent of an avant-garde dance troupe. He was born in 1971. At the time of his death in May 2005 he was living in Lancaster, PA, a city with a sizeable Amish population, and working on a rock opera, the literary/arts website Windmills Online, which currently maintains a tribute page for him, and finishing the novel Kornwolf. He leaves behind a fiancee and two year old daughter.