A horror novel set in a small Iowa college town. A farmer's daughter, a history professor, a rich sorority girl, a skate punk, and a little girl arrive on the frozen campus and discover it is nothing like what they expected. This is a funny, violent, frightening adventure that promises an ending you will not expect.
Excerpt:
He has finished hurting her for now. She runs from the house as she always does after this. In the barn she finds the small caliber rifle he bought her for shooting crows.
"Ya get a quarter a head," he’d said, picking at his dentures with a long dirty fingernail. "Kill twenty, Jerry-Jean, an’ ya can take Saturd’y afternoon off."
Most farmers would have used noisemakers, or given her a shotgun, but he wanted them dead and he said the rifle would make her a good shot. It did.
She is sweating as she climbs the steep slope of the levee behind the house. She slips and branches from a stunted maple scratch her ankle, drawing blood. She ignores the wound, leans on her rifle to get her balance, and keeps climbing. At the top of the levee a rough Army Corps of Engineers road winds between the trees. Cicadas buzz above her in the still green. As she walks she kicks stones from the road. Her hands shake as she loads the rifle. It is a small gun, but still too large for her nine year old hands. A couple of rounds fall to the dirt, and as she kneels to pick them up, she begins to sing in a low wavering voice.
"Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts."
She doesn’t know the rest of the song, so she just repeats the same verse over and over. A fat green tree slug is making its way across the road in front of her. She steps on it, watching as its insides spurt out on each side of her canvas sneaker.
"Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts."
She is almost a mile and a half from home now. Below her a paved road emerges from the cornfields and turns toward a trailer park that sits in the shade of the levee. Through a gap in the thick summer foliage she can see an old-fashioned Airstream trailer that has been pockmarked by a bad hailstorm. It looks like someone spent an entire afternoon crawling all over the trailer’s roof with a ball-peen hammer pounding in dents. In front of the trailer a little girl in overalls is playing with a big-pawed black labrador puppy. The girl has pink glass balls in her pigtails, and her skin is nearly as dark as the dog.
Jerry-Jean raises her rifle and aims. She can feel a drop of sweat roll down behind her ear.
She whispers, "Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts."
The rifle cracks. The puppy yelps and falls. The little girl with the pigtails shakes him, saying something that Jerry-Jean can’t hear. Then the girl sees the blood, and starts to scream.
