Nitro Mountain

Lee Clay Johnson, T. Ryder Smith

eAudio - 2016

An astonishing, even shocking debut—darker than a bad night in hell—that is written with both humor and heart by "a writer with abundant and scary gifts and consummate skill." Set in a bitterly benighted, mine-polluted corner of Virginia, Nitro Mountain follows a group of people bound together by alcohol, small-time crime, and music. There's Leon, a hapless bass player who can embroil himself in trouble just by getting out of bed in the morning. And his would-be girlfriend, Jennifer, who's living with Arnett, the town's most dangerous thug—and hoping Leon will help poison him. And there's Arnett himself, a psychopath for the ages—albeit so charming and deranged, so strikingly authentic, that he arrests ...the reader's attention at first sight and holds it fast. His mirror image, a singer-songwriter named Jones, has his own moral issues, though at least he's trying to be a good man. The bright if battered soul who pulls us through this story is Jennifer,... more