Triana’s debut novel The Ruin Season is now available.
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Jake Leonard has more than his share of trouble.
He’s close to forty now and still suffers from bipolar disorder and the painful memories of the psychotic episodes that derailed his life and sent him behind bars as a youth. He lives in the rural south where he spends his days breaking horses and his nights training dogs in solitude. His nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Nikki, is the daughter of the sheriff, and she’s just getting worse with drugs, alcohol and satanic metal, eventually leading into heroin and low-budget porn. When Jake reconnects with his ex-wife, things get even more complicated, and the limits of love and sanity get pushed to the breaking point.
The Ruin Season is a haunting, violent tale of a mentally ill man struggling in a violent and heartless world. It is the story of unrequited love, mad rage, and bloody revenge. It moves forward in the dark style of gritty southern gothic novels, in the tradition of Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Daniel Woodrell, Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Conner. It shows both the tender and horrible sides of insanity as well as the seedy underbelly of the American, backwoods suburbs.
“The Ruin Season bristles and lurches powerfully with lust and dope, violence and satanic music, but make no mistake, it’s a runaway train whose engine is pure heart, and Kristopher Triana keeps it on the tracks just long enough to give you hope that the little engine can. Makes it hurt true. Hell of a crash.”
—Jedidiah Ayres, author of Peckerwood
“I’ve written that a way to judge the health of a genre is to gauge the number of emerging young, good writers. Kristopher Triana is one of the newest bumper crop of good ones. I read a couple of his short stories after meeting him at the recent StokerCon. His prose is excellent, his plots compelling. The Ruin Season has these same qualities. Kris has the Write Stuff. Check out a rising star.”
—Gene O’Neill, author of The Cal Wild Chronicles and Entangled Soul with Chris Marrs
“The Ruin Season is like the literary equivalent of Springsteen’s classic Nebraska. It’s a book with a stripped back feel, brooding with raw emotion and atmosphere where Triana allows his characters to bare their souls and bleed onto every page.”
—Adrian Shotbolt, BeavistheBookhead
“The Ruin Season by Kristopher Triana portrays mental illness and small town dynamics with a grit and a fearlessness I’ve rarely seen before… The compounded, unpredictable and patient storyline really worked a number on me… Triana is a smart and patient storyteller and an underrated tragedian.” – Benoit Lelievre of Dead End Follies