Bone Dogs

Tuesday Price is a wiseass, a boozer, and a loser. Only his wife Linda recalls a smarter, better man, and she’s losing faith in that man’s return. When Tuesday befriends a strange, silent Vietnam vet who eternally sits with a cooler of beer in a disabled pickup, Linda’s had enough. At her departure, Tuesday is left with only his new friend as a companion—until the old vet is found dead, and Tuesday is blamed. Alone and haunted by regret, Tuesday’s daily life deteriorates until he must unearth his sordid past to reach a worthwhile future. But his past is a tangle of murder, deceit, and abandonment for which his only punishment has been self-inflicted. In order to reclaim all that has been lost, he returns to his deserted childhood home and, with hammer and nails, rebuilds the sagging structure, reassembling a history quite different than the one he’d believed while finding the future not at all what he’d expected.

Bone Dogs is a truly amazing testament to the power of storytelling, and Tuesday Price, a poor drunk from Ransom, West Virginia, is one of the most beautifully rendered and flawed and honest characters in all of fiction. If Roger Alan Skipper doesn’t win prizes and acclaim for this novel, then I figure all of us writers better just pack it in and head for the hills. –
-Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All The Time.

Bone Dogs is an exceptional novel, particularly impressive for its distinctive voice and vivid rendering of place. Roger Skipper is a writer who deserves a wide and appreciative audience. -Ron Rash, author of Serena

If you love to read, read this book. -- Lawrence Sutin

In the tradition of such acclaimed southern novelists as Tom Franklin and William Gay, Skipper is a remarkable storyteller. -- Howard Frank Mosher

Skipper writes in the richly textured language that is unmistakably the voice of Appalachia. -- Erik Reece

[A] welcome addition to fiction set in contemporary Appalachia. This book is terrific. -- Chris Offut

[A]n unsentimental, clear-eyed look at what happens to people caught between hope and limitation." -- Barbara Hurd

[B]rings both protagonists and environment to life in powerful language that ultimately becomes a sort of hard-edged poetry -- William Gay, author of Provinces of Night