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Deer hunting season starts in three days, and nearly everyone in the Ozarks is preparing to gun down a big buck. But in the backwoods town of Doe Run, Missouri, wild game won’t be the only target.
A desperate drifter on the run, Pen Cullen, reluctantly returns home after a thirteen-year absence for the sole reason to pick up a family inheritance, and he discovers that his no-good father had squandered it all before dying. He also surprisingly learns that his former flame, Tara Hawkins, had ended up marrying his childhood buddy, Byron Tisdale, but their relationship recently derailed after they’d tragically lost their little boy to an accidental shooting by the hands of a hot-headed farmer.
Grief-stricken Tara has since gone to religion. Byron has turned into a hallucinating drunk and maniacal recluse. And as Pen reacquaints himself with the town and these two old relations, their secret obsessions over greed, guilt, revenge, and redemption slowly ignite into a violent reckoning on the opening day of the hunt.
“Sean Jacques knows the heart of the Ozarks, and puts that knowledge on full display in this sweltering debut. Doe Run burns slow like good bourbon. Drink up.”
—Eli Cranor, author of Don’t Know Tough, Ozark Dogs, and Broiler
“Recalling grit lit titans like Larry Brown and Daniel Woodrell, Jacques delivers the kind of Old Testament country noir that lives with you long after the last page. Doe Run is a beautifully rendered Ozark drama, a tale of friendship, grief and small-town tragedy by a storyteller who knows the land and his people down to the core. With prose that pops like birdshot and paints with stunning authenticity the hardscrabble hills of southwest Missouri, our ‘hero’ Pen Cullen may prove that You Can’t Go Home Again but I will gladly return to the well if it’s got Sean Jacques’ name on it.”
—Peter Farris, author of Last Call for the Living and The Devil Himself
“In Doe Run, Sean Jacques has assembled an entire slate of lonely characters yearning to find their way in a broken world, and he tells their stories with depth and compassion. This is a rural noir full of pathos and grit—and it absolutely deserves your attention.”
—C.W. Blackwell, author of Hard Mountain Clay
“Doe Run is an unflinching portrait of grief, lost love, and the long, haunting shadows of the past. This gritty tale lays bare the darkest depths of the human condition, and the flawed, rough-hewn characters will undoubtedly stick with you. With prose as spare and sharp as barbed wire, Sean Jacques delivers the goods with his impressive debut.”
—Scott Blackburn, author of It Dies with You
“In this simmering debut, Sean Jacques renders the lives of his desperate characters with care and empathy, but doesn’t hold back when it all boils over.”
—Scott Von Doviak, author of Lowdown Road
“Doe Run is sitting smack in-between the poetic rumination of McCarthy and the Ozark mud of Woodrell. The novel delivers real pain and real evil but also a real shot at redemption, which is rare in this genre. But don’t be mistaken, Sean Jacques still delivers a tale with teeth on par with any Peckinpah film. If you let yourself be immersed in the story, it will linger with you long after you finish.”
—Brian Panowich, author of Bull Mountain & Nothing But The Bones
“Like a cigarette butt tossed into the underbrush, Doe Run smolders. Haunted by their pasts, these characters are hunting for redemption, but are trapped in mires of betrayal and generational trauma. Fueled by fury and whiskey, they chase one bad idea after another in this rural noir tale of desperation where the coals burn bright under the leaf litter, just waiting to set the forest alight, as Jacques fans the flames with twists and secrets.”
—Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs and Here in the Dark
Sean Jacques is a fifth-generation native of the Missouri Ozarks and currently resides in Los Angeles. He has written screenplays for TNT, John Woo, Guy Ritchie, and other film producers, and his short stories and poetry can be found in a number of literary magazines, including: Cowboy Jamboree; Pulp Modern Flash; 34 Orchard; Across The Margin; Punk Noir; Flyover Country; A Thin Slice of Anxiety; and Dead Fern Press.
