Huckleberry Hill

Seventeen-year-old Ezra-Nori-Thorpe-Casey is in a jam. He’s locked up in the steeple of the Free Will Baptist Church in Mansfield, Oklahoma awaiting his fate: a shotgun wedding to Preacher Bascom’s daughter, Roseabeth. The shotgun-toting Preacher is convinced Ezra “ruined” Roseabeth on prom night and aims to make things right. By hook or crook, luck or logic, Ezra needs to find a way to evade the unholy union with the less that angelic Roseabeth; however, with Preacher, the town bully, the county sheriff, and the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution coming down on him like hard rain, it will take a miracle for Ezra to maintain his freedom, never mind his dignity. And sometimes miracles happen, even to those who think they’re undeserving. At other times, as Billy Joel tells us: “Only the Good Die Young.”

David W. Christner was born in Sweetwater, TN and raised in a small farming community situated between the Washita River and the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma; in his youth he attended church, picked cotton, plowed fields, harvested wheat, hauled hay and moved irrigation pipe. After a stint with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam and Norfolk, VA, he settled permanently in South County, RI, just across the bay from Newport where he had attended Officer Candidate School five years earlier. Speculations on the cosmos, sex, war, religion, injustice, environmental exploitation, aging, women's issues, the homeless and capital punishment have formed the thematic content of the plays and novels he has written so far. Christner is an award-winning playwright. In addition to the U.S., his plays have been produced in Australia, Japan, Belgium, India and Canada. "Red Hot Mamas" was recently translated into Russian and Italian for pending productions. Christner is theater critic for the Newport Mercury in Newport, RI. "Huckleberry Hill" is his fourth novel.