Published by Concord Free Press 2010.
Rut takes readers to the Rocky Mountains circa 2050, when the once-thriving burg of Gower is about to become a 21st-century ghost town. Thanks to extreme weather and plenty of toxic waste, the skiers and celebrities are gone, along with the money and the veneer of civilization. What’s left? Old-time religion and brand-new pharmaceuticals, bad food and warm beer, mutated animals and small-town gossip. Can the town survive? Read Rut and see.
Sly and cool, absurd and archly perceptive, Rut resonates with the best work of Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon, all in a wonderfully weird tale unlike any other.
“If you took the tender portrait of a town in decline in Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, mixed it with Kurt Vonnegut at his most satirical and biting, then sprinkled in a few grams of meth and a generous shot of piss from a syphilitic hobo into the resulting solution, you’d have a drink that could almost put you on your ass as fast as Rut sure-as-shit will.” –Spinetingler Magazine
“Scott Phillips holds up to the light a dark crystal ball in which swirls our future.” —Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh
“Part of me would love to live in the near-future world Scott Phillips has imagined in Rut, but only a little part. Another great novel from one of our best.” —Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
“Phillips does what Heinlein used to do so well, which is make his future seem lived in. It’s quite a book.”
– Locus Magazine
Rut takes readers to the Rocky Mountains circa 2050, where the once thriving burg of Gower is about to become a 21st-century ghost town. Thanks to extreme weather and plenty of toxic waste, the skiers and celebrities are gone, along with the money and the veneer of civilization. What’s left? Old-time religion and brand-new pharmaceuticals, bad food and warm beer, mutated animals and small-town gossip. Can the town survive? We’ll see.
– www.goodreads.com