Jason Jack Miller's debut novel
The Devil and Preston Black is out!
Here's the synopsis:
You'd think finding a song named after you on an old record would be kind of cool. But that's not how it goes down for Preston Black.
What starts out as a search for his old man turns into a quest for an original version of "The Sad Ballad of Preston Black". Turns out the song is about his deal with the devil, a deal Preston doesn't really remember making.
When the devil decides it's time to cash in things get really interesting. People he loves get hurt, and Preston starts to wonder if a long fall into an icy river is his only way out.
Lucky for Preston, he has help. A music ethnographer with connections in some of Appalachia's darkest hollows convinces him that his salvation can be found in the music. Preston can buy that. It's the hexes, curses and spells he has a hard time with.
And it's the ghost of John Lennon who convinces Preston to do something about it.
"With this new book, Jason Jack Miller has single-handedly cornered the market on Appalachian Noir fiction, and deservedly so."
-Michale A. Arnzen, four time Bram Stoker Award winner
"With the photographic clarity of a beat poet's metaphor and the soulful twang of a bluesman's axe, Jason Jack Miller draws the reader down a trail of folksong breadcrumbs to the haunted backwoods of Appalachia, where the worst devil of all may be the one that stalks our hopes and dreams."
-Christopher Paul Carey, co-author of
The Song of Kwasin
