There were always two options: the closet or under the bed. -Sue Hinton, retired English professor, Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC) Justin Jones captures the raw essence of human.
The Devil\'s Smokehouse is a page-turner that is hard to put down.
Even his own road to nowhere takes an unexpected turn.
As he matures, Jenkins uncovers more dark secrets, learning that the twisting threads of big-city drug culture have a stranglehold on some local powerbrokers.
Everyone knows everyone in this hamlet where even the local pervert\'s identity is an open secret.
Jenkins underrates the prevalence of evil in his hometown, an impoverished rural community in the middle of the country. -Fury Young, founder of Die Jim Crow Records It\'s a struggle to survive childhood, and that\'s the conundrum faced by Jenkins, the narrator of Justin Jones\'s coming-of-age mystery novel, The Devil\'s Smokehouse.
Jones weaves plot twists that are fantastical but believable, as only a survivor could.
One who must cross a line in order to keep surviving.
A work of fiction inspired by the author\'s childhood, The Devil\'s Smokehouse is the inspiring, painful, exhilarating, disturbing, and at times hilarious journey of a child survivor.
The Devil\'s Smokehouse is an unvarnished story of the ravages of rural poverty and an unsparing look at one boy managing to triumph against crushing odds.
The realities of the lives of Jenkins and Jill are not unfamiliar to author Justin Jones, who has firsthand experience in the juvenile and adult justice systems.
While contemplating eventual revenge on his father, Jenkins must decide how to handle people and situations whose evil and cruelty will test ordinary readers\' imaginations.
As they grow into adolescence, Jill copes by focusing on doing well in school so that she can get out as soon as she can, as Jenkins is sucked into a life of truancy and increasing violence.
In his drunken rampages, he regularly beats Jenkins, Jill, and their mother, smashes up the shabby dwelling that serves as their home, and then retreats to his bedroom, his chamber of horrors.
It\'s a long bus ride through farmland to school where both children put on brave faces to cover up for the nights they suffer at the hands of their violent, alcoholic father, to whom they refer as the Devil.
In the 1960s, young Jenkins and his sister, Jill are trying to grow up in a dusty, hardscrabble area a few miles out from a one-stoplight town in the American southwest.
There were always two options: the closet or under the bed
