The Easter House

David Rhodes

Aga 2009 · Milkweed Editions

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This tale of two Iowa brothers trying to escape the long shadow of their notorious father is “an almost impossible book to put down” (The Plain Dealer).

This gripping novel tells the tale of the Easter family of Ontarion, Iowa. Ansel Easter was a favored minister until he rescued a grotesque creature from a carnival sideshow. His sons, C and Sam, suffer in the shadow of their outcast father until his violent death. C and Sam leave the home their father built for a new beginning, and find fortune building a lucrative business called the Associates—but when a rash of deaths has the townspeople looking at C and Sam as suspects, they find their father’s legacy reaches further than they expect.

Taut, dark, and engrossing, The Easter House is a brilliant work of fiction by the acclaimed author of Driftless and Jewelweed.

“David Rhodes’s writing is smooth and wry, combining Richard Russo’s genius for the details of small-town thinking and Flannery O’Connor’s flair for shading things toward the weird side of normal.” —Mpls.St. Paul Magazine

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As a young man, David Rhodes worked in fields, hospitals, and factories across Iowa. After receiving an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971, he published The Last Fair Deal Going Down (Atlantic/Little Brown, 1972), iThe Easter House (Milkweed Editions, 2008). In 1977 a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. First published in hardcover in 2008, Driftless was David Rhodes’ first novel in thirty years. A 2008 Booklist Editors’ Choice selection, Driftless garnered attention in the Wall Street Journal, Poets & Writers, New Yorker, Bookforum, Christian Science Monitor, Books & Culture, Time Out Chicago, Philadelphia City Paper, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Chicago Tribune, Des Moines Register, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, California Literary Review, and on National Public Radio. Rhodes has also contributed to the New York Times. He lives with his wife, Edna, in rural Wisconsin.