Tristan Egolf (1971-2005)

Cult classic novels

Tristan Egolf (1971-2005), the author of the cult classic novels "Lord of the Barnyard" and "Skirt and the Fiddle" was found dead in an apartment Saturday in Lancaster, Pa. Egolf's death by shotgun has been ruled a suicide by the Lancaster police. He was 33.

Skirt and the Fiddle

Author of the internationally acclaimed Lord of the Barnyard, Tristan Egolf has established himself as one of the most audacious and inventive young writers in America. With Skirt and the Fiddle, Egolf has given us a novel that is equal parts headlong plunge into the joys and absurdity of infatuation and a love song to the maddening folly of friendship. Charlie Evans is a brilliant violinist who, embittered by a truly horrendous gig, has kissed the fiddle and the entire straight world good-bye.
He lives in a flophouse among misfits like Armless Rob, Emmylou Mattressback, and Tinsel Greetz, an ersatz anarchist and 200-proof charlatan. Mutually antagonistic and joined at the shot glass, Tinsel and Charlie nevertheless make a great team, and when they get a highly illegal, extremely lucrative gig killing rats in the sewers, they are a deadly, unstoppable force. The morning after dissipating their hard-earned money, the boys wake up in a strange (five-star!) hotel room with the worst hangovers of their lives. And when Charlie meets the bewitching Louise, who's offered them shelter - well, then he's in trouble of a whole new sort.
Skirt and the Fiddle by Tristan Egolf
ISBN: 0802140424

Lord of the Barnyard

Lord of the Barnyard begins with the death of a woolly mammoth in the last Ice Age and concludes with a greased-pig chase at a funeral in the modern-day Midwest. In the interim there are two hydroelectric dam disasters, fourteen tavern brawls, one shoot-out in the hills, three cases of probable arson, a riot in the town hall, a lone tornado, a coven of Methodist crones, an encampment of Appalachian crop thieves, six renegade coal-truck operators, an outraged mob of factory rats, a dysfunctional poultry plant, and one autodidact goat-roping farm boy by the name of John Kaltenbrunner.
Lord of the Barnyard is a comic tapestry of a Middle America populated by assembly-line drones and poultry-plant neckslicers, measuring into shot glasses the fruits of years of quiet desperation on the factory floor. It is a plea for nothing more than the minimal respect owed to the most forgotten blue-collar workers of the global proletariat, and a word of warning that respect denied can go much farther than postal.
Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt by Tristan Egolf
ISBN: 0802136729