THE SCARECROW

*** NEUSEELAND - GASTLAND DER BUCHMESSE 2012 ***

Neddy Poindexter is 14, his sister Prudence, the most glamorous creature in Klynham, is almost 16. Neddy has the gift of the gab but so does everybody else in this irresistible comedy of small-town life that turns macabre when the vulture-like Hubert Salter, no less than Salter the Sensational, stalks into Klynham. Neddy takes revenge for the theft of fowls from their yard, but then the Lynch gang intervenes. This is far less terrifying than what happens to Mabel Collinson and Sam Finn. There's a sex killer on the loose, and Neddy is in deep fear for the safety of his sister. Can he save her before the Scarecrow acts?

A lost gem of a novel, somewhere between 'Catcher in the Rye' and 'A Confederacy of Dunces', by New Zealand author Ronald Hugh Morrieson, who died in alcoholic obscurity in 1972 at the age of fifty. He has written three other novels after this debut.

"Such an instinct for combining the bizarre and the beautiful that I am entirely disarmed." (C.K. Stead)

1/2011 Graphic adaption rights to Rivage, France;