DELIVER THY PIGS by Joey Hedger
from Malarkey Books
Reviewed by Adam Van Winkle
There’s a lot of emotion bound up in a hometown. John Updike couldn’t live his adult life in his hometown, but he couldn’t leave it either—all of his best stories and books are a fictionalized version of it.
Like Updike’s fictionalized hometown whose air always held the smell of menthol long after the cough drop factory closed, the air in Marco Polo Woodridge’s hometown of Prairie Ridge, IL is ripe with factory stink in Joey Hedger’s new novel DELIVER THY PIGS (out now from Malarkey Books). The olfactory dominating factory in PIGS is aptly a slaughterhouse and pork plant, J. Lowell’s.
Marco Polo is engaged in a game of minor sabotage. When he can, he stakes out a position a couple of hundreds yards away, over-pumps his air rifle, and showers the windows of the factory with pellets. One day, perhaps because of the stress of repeated pings, he manages to put a small hole in the factory manager’s window.
Marco Polo is bent on revenge, of some kind or another, because his father was killed in a factory accident at J. Lowell’s. Every whiff of killed pig in the air reminds Marco Polo, a sandwich shop manager in his early twenties who is no longer eating meat, of the death of his dad.
The residents of Prairie Ridge take a small modicum of pride in knowing they are one of the Midwest’s supreme pork producing epicenters. They all hate the smell. Thus they all love their town in a way, “while simultaneously hating its guts,” which, as Hedger’s narrator notes, “is how many people feel about their hometowns.”
These opposing tensions are bound up in the name as well. A prairie is an enormous stretch of flat grassland while a ridge is a chain of mountains or hills that form a continuous elevated crest. Opposites. Yet, somehow, they’re thrown together in a town called Prairie Ridge. The Illinois town may be fictional in DELIVER THY PIGS but there is a Prairie Ridge, Texas, and a Prairie Ridge High School in Crystal Lake, Illinois, and any number of nondescript apartment complexes and hospitals and streets across America called Prairie Ridge. Hedger has tapped into something ubiquitous here.
There’s symbolism in the angsty protagonist’s name too of course. Marco Polo may still be in his hometown, but he is on a trip of discovery. He’s out to test the limits he’s willing to go—not in distance but in deed—to satiate the revenge on J. Lowell’s he seeks like a nicotine addict in need of the next cigarette.
I’ve been listening to Iris Dement’s “OUR TOWN” a lot lately, and perhaps it infused my reading of DELIVER THY PIGS, with a protagonist who knows every spot in his town, has a memory of each one and seemingly with every person he encounters. But the sun is settin’ fast as the stakes and pace ramp up from the beginning in this story when Marco Polo teams up with a mother-daughter combo straight out of Flannery O’Connor: “tree lady” Susan Banks and her daughter, Margaret.
Susan’s husband has left, she lives on government checks and the inherited farm property of a dead relative. Margaret, like O’Connor and the protagonist of “Good Country People,” has had to return home to a family farm run by her mother as an adult due to a disease that leaves her in need of crutches to get around. Together, they wage guerilla warfare with plants: planting tree saplings under cover of darkness where J. Lowell’s doesn’t want them, and wrapping the factory gates in poison ivy for the unsuspecting factory manager to untangle.
Susan and Margaret suspect, correctly, it is Marco Polo who shot out the manager’s window and propose teaming up. He accepts. And we’re off to the races on a bigger caper…
The J. Lowell factory manager, Dave, is seemingly innocent of direct attack. He tries to be a good boss. He gives his employees longer breaks than the company really allows. He tries to implement new policy without stepping on anyone. But, at the end of the day, he’s a company man that toes the line. This is his sin.
Complicating the war of revenge on J. Lowell’s, and therefore Dave, is Marco Polo’s budding relationship with June, Dave’s sister who has moved in with him since her husband divorced her. Marco Polo meets June without knowing she is the sister of the manager of J. Lowell’s.
If this sounds like a well-written TV show or Midwestern movie, in many ways it reads that way too. DELIVER THY PIGS is cinematic to read, and the plot delivers on dramatic promise, turning in ways to keep the reader hooked on this small town soap opera. Everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone’s routines. It is an ordinary town with an every day life. Yet, this novel is anything but ordinary and every day. These characters are extraordinary, and Hedger has done a remarkable job in crafting them.
Along with Updike and O’Connor and Dement I thought of TWIN PEAKS as I read—after all, “tree lady” seems a direct reference to the “log lady” and there’s a large factory looming over a town. Beyond that though, Hedger has created a story beyond quirk, with enough every day details to feel real, and enough extraordinary incidents to be unexpected and captivating and magical.
Get your copy now from Malarkey Books and find out who will prevail in the classic tale of the little people versus the big factory, of a young man versus his hometown, of the past versus the present. DELIVER THY PIGS is timeless, and special, and worth reading.
from Malarkey Books
Reviewed by Adam Van Winkle
There’s a lot of emotion bound up in a hometown. John Updike couldn’t live his adult life in his hometown, but he couldn’t leave it either—all of his best stories and books are a fictionalized version of it.
Like Updike’s fictionalized hometown whose air always held the smell of menthol long after the cough drop factory closed, the air in Marco Polo Woodridge’s hometown of Prairie Ridge, IL is ripe with factory stink in Joey Hedger’s new novel DELIVER THY PIGS (out now from Malarkey Books). The olfactory dominating factory in PIGS is aptly a slaughterhouse and pork plant, J. Lowell’s.
Marco Polo is engaged in a game of minor sabotage. When he can, he stakes out a position a couple of hundreds yards away, over-pumps his air rifle, and showers the windows of the factory with pellets. One day, perhaps because of the stress of repeated pings, he manages to put a small hole in the factory manager’s window.
Marco Polo is bent on revenge, of some kind or another, because his father was killed in a factory accident at J. Lowell’s. Every whiff of killed pig in the air reminds Marco Polo, a sandwich shop manager in his early twenties who is no longer eating meat, of the death of his dad.
The residents of Prairie Ridge take a small modicum of pride in knowing they are one of the Midwest’s supreme pork producing epicenters. They all hate the smell. Thus they all love their town in a way, “while simultaneously hating its guts,” which, as Hedger’s narrator notes, “is how many people feel about their hometowns.”
These opposing tensions are bound up in the name as well. A prairie is an enormous stretch of flat grassland while a ridge is a chain of mountains or hills that form a continuous elevated crest. Opposites. Yet, somehow, they’re thrown together in a town called Prairie Ridge. The Illinois town may be fictional in DELIVER THY PIGS but there is a Prairie Ridge, Texas, and a Prairie Ridge High School in Crystal Lake, Illinois, and any number of nondescript apartment complexes and hospitals and streets across America called Prairie Ridge. Hedger has tapped into something ubiquitous here.
There’s symbolism in the angsty protagonist’s name too of course. Marco Polo may still be in his hometown, but he is on a trip of discovery. He’s out to test the limits he’s willing to go—not in distance but in deed—to satiate the revenge on J. Lowell’s he seeks like a nicotine addict in need of the next cigarette.
I’ve been listening to Iris Dement’s “OUR TOWN” a lot lately, and perhaps it infused my reading of DELIVER THY PIGS, with a protagonist who knows every spot in his town, has a memory of each one and seemingly with every person he encounters. But the sun is settin’ fast as the stakes and pace ramp up from the beginning in this story when Marco Polo teams up with a mother-daughter combo straight out of Flannery O’Connor: “tree lady” Susan Banks and her daughter, Margaret.
Susan’s husband has left, she lives on government checks and the inherited farm property of a dead relative. Margaret, like O’Connor and the protagonist of “Good Country People,” has had to return home to a family farm run by her mother as an adult due to a disease that leaves her in need of crutches to get around. Together, they wage guerilla warfare with plants: planting tree saplings under cover of darkness where J. Lowell’s doesn’t want them, and wrapping the factory gates in poison ivy for the unsuspecting factory manager to untangle.
Susan and Margaret suspect, correctly, it is Marco Polo who shot out the manager’s window and propose teaming up. He accepts. And we’re off to the races on a bigger caper…
The J. Lowell factory manager, Dave, is seemingly innocent of direct attack. He tries to be a good boss. He gives his employees longer breaks than the company really allows. He tries to implement new policy without stepping on anyone. But, at the end of the day, he’s a company man that toes the line. This is his sin.
Complicating the war of revenge on J. Lowell’s, and therefore Dave, is Marco Polo’s budding relationship with June, Dave’s sister who has moved in with him since her husband divorced her. Marco Polo meets June without knowing she is the sister of the manager of J. Lowell’s.
If this sounds like a well-written TV show or Midwestern movie, in many ways it reads that way too. DELIVER THY PIGS is cinematic to read, and the plot delivers on dramatic promise, turning in ways to keep the reader hooked on this small town soap opera. Everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone’s routines. It is an ordinary town with an every day life. Yet, this novel is anything but ordinary and every day. These characters are extraordinary, and Hedger has done a remarkable job in crafting them.
Along with Updike and O’Connor and Dement I thought of TWIN PEAKS as I read—after all, “tree lady” seems a direct reference to the “log lady” and there’s a large factory looming over a town. Beyond that though, Hedger has created a story beyond quirk, with enough every day details to feel real, and enough extraordinary incidents to be unexpected and captivating and magical.
Get your copy now from Malarkey Books and find out who will prevail in the classic tale of the little people versus the big factory, of a young man versus his hometown, of the past versus the present. DELIVER THY PIGS is timeless, and special, and worth reading.