Sheepshagger

This is the story of the feral, inarticulate, inbred, ignoble savage; haunter of mountains, killer of innocents. Ianto is a sheepshagger — a yokel, a Welsh redneck. But Ianto is also a seer, a visionary — the genius loci — who comprehends nature with a Blakean intensity, and is at one with the world he lives the moss and lichen, the lamb and the raven, the summit and the scree.

Robbed of his ancestral home — a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales — Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother’s cottage into a weekenders’ barbecue party but on all those who have violated him and the land that is his. The oppression and abuse that Ianto has faced triggers his lurid imagination into unspeakable savagery — embodying the most primal fears of physical threat and a world beyond his control.

An extraordinary prose amalgam of Old Testament prophecy and demotic slang, of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Sheepshagger is written in a language charged to the highest lyrical and hieratic, saturated — like nature — in beauty and violence. And the spirit of its place, Ianto, at once both Caliban and Prospero, will hang in the memory of all who read his story like a devil or a god.