The People of the Broken Neck - by Silas Dent Zobal (Paperback)

About the Book

"A special-ops veteran of the war in Afghanistan returns to a broken marriage. When we meet him, he may or may not have killed his estranged wife. He is on the run with his two children-an adolescent boy who is big enough to fight back and an 8-year-old girl who wants to believe her father is a good man. The FBI agent in pursuit has family troubles of his own, including a suicidal daughter, but he can't get back home because of his unnatural obsession with this fugitive and the two children he is dragging with him cross-country. This is a thriller"--

Book Synopsis

From the woods where he hides with his nearly grown son Clarke and his young daughter King, ex-Army Ranger Dominick Sawyer watches Agent Charlie Basin's flashlight beam bounce on the walls inside his cabin. Dom's wife is missing. His post-trauma hallucinations rip at him explosively and bring him to his knees. And a local deputy sheriff is dead. When the FBI agents recede into the night, the Sawyers begin to run, across the country in stolen trucks, leaving a trail of blood behind them. Together with a young girl they pick up on the road, they hope to run until they find a peaceable place in the American Northwest.

But Agent Basin sees his own troubled family reflected in Dom's haunted existence, and his pursuit is relentless.

All any of them want is to spirit King away to someplace safe.

All she wants is not to be afraid of her father and to find out why her mother disappeared.

Review Quotes

"A tour de force of a debut novel, which blends elements of mainstream thriller, noir fiction, preternatural mystery, and travelogue. ... Powered by rich imagery, darkly lyrical prose, and a deeply philosophical undertone, this novel explores the nature of family--particularly when those familial bonds begin breaking--with profoundly moving conclusions." Publishers Weekly

"America's Gogol." -- Claire Vaye Watkins

"Silas Dent Zobal's The People of the Broken Neck is one of those rare hybrids: a thriller and a deeply philosophical novel, a novel so finely attuned to the dark currents of human love and aggression that it touches those wellsprings that lie beneath the human. Beautiful and hard, Zobel's prose is like a newly-cleaned rifle." -- John Vernon

"I am a forever fan of Silas Dent Zobal, a direct descendant of the great stylists and provocateurs of arts and letters." -- Claire Vaye Watkins


"A searing debut novel: terse sentences juxtaposed with ambiguous, surreal descriptions of violence and the after-effects of trauma. ... A literary thriller somewhere between Phil Klay and Dennis Lehane." -- Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

About the Author

Silas Dent Zobal is the author of a collection of stories, The Inconvenience of the Wings. His debut novel, The People of the Broken Neck, is forthcoming from Unbridled Books. He has published short fiction in the Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, New Orleans Review, North American Review, Green Mountain Review, Shenandoah, Wisconsin Review, and elsewhere. He has won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, been a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and been awarded a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Harrisburg, PA.