Under the Dog Star - Hardcover

JOSEPH CALDWELL is a playwright and novelist who has been awarded the Rome Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of five novels in addition to the Pig Trilogy. He began writing the trilogy when he was a volunteer in a hospital during the AIDS epidemic. Realizing his work could get no darker, he had to lighten up. Caldwell lives in New York City.

TAMARA MARSTON has been an actor, singer and director for over 30 years. A career performer / musician, Tami has toured nationally with several groups and appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show and A&E’s Goodtime Café. Dividing her time between acting and singing gigs, choral conducting, music and stage directing, jingle and voiceover work, private and public teaching—and family—Tami feels very fortunate to make her living working in the arts.

Propelled by misguided sexuality, this understated novel exerts a strong and often unpleasant grip. After Andy Durant is killed while robbing a gas station, his wife Grady collects their three children, Peter, Anne and Martha, and moves back to the farm where she was raised. All four Durants pivot around Royal Provo, a grease-monkey orphan worshipped by Peter and despised by Anne, who sleeps with him nonetheless. As the summer progresses, Grady imputes laughably complex motives to simple people and engages in a round-robin of rejection that claims at least one life. Later, the money stolen by Andy Durant surfaces to point an accusing finger at more than one of his brood. Despite lackluster passages, Caldwell strikes a consistently ominous tone, and his resolution is at once sharp and bittersweet.
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