Synopses & Reviews
In the raucous and action-packed follow-up to Donnybrook, mayhem is still the order of the day—only more soFrank Bills America has always been stark and violent. In his new novel, he takes things one step further: the dollar has failed; the grid is wiped out.
Van Dorn is eighteen and running solo, dodging the bloodthirsty hordes and militias that have emerged since the country went haywire. His dead fathers voice rings in his head as Van Dorn sets his sights not just on survival but also on an old-fashioned sense of justice.
Meanwhile, a leader has risen among the gangs—and around him swirls the cast of brawlers from Donnybrook, with their own brutal sense of right and wrong, of loyalty and justice through strength.
So, this is not the distant postapocalyptic future—this is tomorrow, in a world Bill has already introduced us to. Now he raises the stakes and turns his shotgun prose on our addiction to technology, the values and skills weve lost in the process, and what happens when the last systems of morality and society collapse.
The Salvaged and the Savage presents a bone-chilling vision of America where power is the only currency and nothing guarantees survival. And it presents Bill at his most ambitious, most eloquent, most powerful.
Review
Praise for Frank Bill
"Frank Bills first novel, Donnybrook, is vivid in its violence, grim in its grimness. It reams the English language with a broken beer bottle and lets the blood drops tell the story." —Daniel Woodrell
"A literary shotgun blast to the face." —The Independent
"Heres the writer to watch: mad, bad, and dangerous to know." —Megan Abbott
"Bill is one hell of a storyteller." —Kirkus Reviews
"Good Lord, where in the hell did this guy come from? Blasts off like a frigging rocket ship and hits as hard as an ax handle to the side of the head after youve snorted a nose full of battery acid. One of the wildest damn rides youre ever going to take inside a book." —Donald Ray Pollock
Synopsis
In the raucous and action-packed follow-up to Donnybrook, mayhem is still the order of the day--only more so
The dollar has failed; the grid is wiped out. Walmarts are looted and homes are abandoned as common folk flee and bloodthirsty militias fight for power. In a twenty-first century America gone haywire, Darwinian struggle for survival is the law of the land.
Van Dorn, eighteen and running solo, was raised by his father in the old ways: to value survival, self-reliance, and righteousness. Determined to seek justice, he fights through a litany of horrors to save those captured by Cotto, a savage, drug-crazed warlord who has risen among the roving gangs, gaining territory while enslaving women and children. As destinies collide and survival becomes an increasingly distant fantasy, battling ideals of right and wrong come to an explosive head.
Chock-full of the razor-sharp prose and bloodlust that made Donnybrook impossible to put down, The Savage nonetheless finds Frank Bill raising the stakes. Here, one of America's most iconoclastic young storytellers presents an unnerving vision of a fractured America gone terribly wrong, and a study of what happens when the last systems of morality and society collapse.
About the Author
Frank Bill is the author of the novel Donnybrook and the story collection Crimes in Southern Indiana, one of GQs favorite books of 2011 and a Daily Beast best debut of 2011. He lives and writes in southern Indiana.