A black comedy. A son cares for his senile father on the family farm that they are slowly losing to an unscrupulous banker. Through in a paraplegic childhood friend, an overweight "girlfriend", the local drug dealer, and set it all in the dry prairie east of Denver.
It's just a little too dark for my taste. One of my favorite novels is "As I Lay Dying" by Faulkner. That is a masterpiece of the black comedy. "East of Denver" has comic moments that border of brilliant, but the big picture is missing. At times the novel lacks direction. Is it about the son's relationship with the senile father? At one point, I thought the whole odd assortment of characters was going to rob a bank - now that would have been an odyssey worthy of a modern-day Faulkner. But in the end it's just about the son's failure to help his father keep the family farm.
So I was disappointed with the arc of the story, but the comic moments almost make up for it...
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