Loud Water

Eight years into a 15-year sentence, Crit Poppwell finally discovered something he was good at, besides destroying his family and abusing drugs. He found art. The solitary act of drawing, painting and creating brings a calmness and separation from the prison chaos. A dreadlocked Dominican nun who teaches art classes behind-bars encourages Crit to paint the “truth in things.” She even helps him parole out, back to “bloody” Breathitt County where his brother is the reigning crystal meth kingpin and his ex-wife wants him dead for an unforgivable past crime that haunts his every heartbeat forward.

Crit returns to his Appalachian hometown with ringing tinnitus in his ear from a prison brawl, and a desire to change his DNA. But he soon meets a hot-mess substance abuser and her son, and his reluctant, then fully committed desire to help her puts him in the crosshairs of his brother’s wrath.

Can Crit flush the past from his blood and bones and use his newfound creativity to change his life and save others? Or die trying?

Critical acclaim for LOUD WATER:

“Robby Henson’s prose crackles with the raw-boned, rough-edged hardness of the Eastern Kentucky landscape, intensely capturing the desperate victims seeking to escape its unforgiving hold…whether through an act of redemption or an act of revenge. A visceral Southern Gothic Noir.” —Charles Edward Pogue, screenwriter of The Fly, Dragonheart, and Psycho III

“Sins of the past litter the backroads of rural Kentucky in this powerful Southern Gothic noir. Redemption is a hard thing to come by. Henson writes like William Faulkner’s Kentucky cousin and reminds us what great writing really looks like.” —John Morrissey, producer of American History X, Havoc, and There Are No Saints

“A brilliant noir debut with a bittersweet ending.” —Jim Winter, author of the Holland Bay series

“Loud Water by Robby Henson grabs you by the collar and yanks you into rural Kentucky on a head-over-heels tumbled journey of crime, redemption, and hard-scrabble characters. Henson has produced some of the most stylized writing I've ever read, a perfect match for the rocky countryside he describes.” —Jack Getze, author of Making Hearts and other novels