Scarecrow Gods
Bram Stoker Award winner 2005.
Scarecrow Gods is the tale of Maxom Phinxs, a black man tortured and disfigured in Vietnam. Maxom, called the Maggot Man by the Tennessee locals, is feared and reviled because of his appearance. Even so, he takes under his wing a troubled young boy named Danny who's fighting incest rumors to repair a shattered family, wondering every day if his sister will return to clear it all up. In southern Arizona, John the New Baptist has created a new religion promising salvation. Most people believe in his strange ways. They don't understand he is establishing a herd for his personal use. Only Simon, a faithless Alexian Brother, and a homeless man named Billy Bones who speaks in palindromes, anagrams and metaphor realize the evil and engage the Scarecrow Gods – a circle of immense saguaro dressed in Salvation Army clothes who speak wisdom in the wind from pursed coke bottle lips. Maxom, Simon, Danny and Billy, all fight and converge upon the center of evil as each journeys through the world of imagination, the Land of Inside-Out and across America, striving to defeat demons both personal and real to ultimately discover their deserved salvations.
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Weston Ochse
Weston Ochse is the award-winning author of more than twenty novels, including the groundbreaking Task Force OMBRA series for Solaris. A military veteran with over thirty years of service who began writing professionally in 1997, Wes has seen his work published in magazines, comics and anthologies. He lives in the Arizona desert, a stone’s throw away from Mexico.
He has won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for his short fiction.
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