When a sixteen-year-old girl is raped down by the river, she tells the police that tramps committed the crime, and the angry townspeople descend upon a camp of drifters seeking revenge. Reprint. NYT.

Down by the River

Schulz, Monte

Literature & Fiction

Signet

After taking over as Chief of Police in the quiet town of Rivertown, California, Carroll Howser finds himself confronted by the gang rape of a teenager, vigilante justice, and a serial murderer targeting the town's teens

Viking Adult

This Side of Jordan, Monte Schulz's literary prose novel, is told in the voice of a lost generation hurtling toward the Great Depression. In the spring of 1929, 19-year-old consumptive farm boy Alvin Pendergast finds an invitation for a late-night slice of pie is too seductive to pass up and before he knows it, he crosses the Mississippi River and finds himself working for a slick con artist named Chester Burke, formerly a gangster out of Chicago. With Alvin in tow, Chester embarks on a series of bank robberies and senseless murders through the small towns of America's middle border, peopled with vivid, outsized literary characters. Fortunately, Alvin finds another companion on his journey, a lonely, eccentric, and grandiloquent dwarf named Rascal. At first too ill to flee, too morally weak to object, Alvin must make a decision: stick with Chester, who would surely kill him at the slightest hint of betrayal, or muster the courage to stake his life on Rascal's clever plan (which includes a circus) to save them both. What Alvin discovers about the meaning of home offers a solution to escape and freedom.

This Side of Jordan

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Fantagraphics Books

In The Big Town, salesman Harry Hennesey’s hopes of success, both in his household and the world, have driven him to sell his home in an Illinois small town, ship his wife and kids to his mother in Texas, and take his chances in the big city, where he has an affair with a flapper half his age. Charles A. Follette, chairman of the board of the American Prometheus Corporation, comes to him with a slick proposition: find Follette’s missing niece, and the road to riches shall be his. Harry discovers a darker secret to the identity of the missing niece and what lies behind the urgency for her detection in a city where gangsters murder ordinary citizens and everyone seems to have a get-rich scheme as the Roaring ’20s come to a thunderous close.

The Big Town

United States

Veteran Joe Krueger is drifting in 1950s California when the sweetâ€” and sexy â€” Ida rents him a room. Joe starts helping out around the boardinghouse, and the two marry. The honeymoon is over when a motel owner and her crippled husband turn up missing, a water softener salesman is shot, and workmen are digging holes in Joe Kruegerâ€™s basement. Based on the true story of Iva Kroeger and her husband Ralph, who were indicted for the murders of Mildred and Jay Arneson in 1962, Naughty culminates in a trial: Ida, whose crimes have (only just) begun to catch up to her, is at her zenith, pleading insanity and playing the part to the hilt. The reader learns Joeâ€™s and Idaâ€™s fates via excerpts from authentic court documents.

Naughty

Genre Fiction

Crossing Eden is the story of an American family in the summer of 1929, when a failed businessman divides himself from his wife and children, and a troubled farm boy runs away from home in the company of a gangster. Itâ€™s also the tale of a nation in the last months of the Roaring Twenties, a glittering decade of exuberance and doubt, optimism and fear. Set equally among the states along the Middle Border, in a small East Texas town, and in a great gleaming metropolis, Crossing Eden chronicles the Pendergast family of Farrington, Illinois, cast apart by circumstance into the early 20th century landscape of big business, tent shows, speakeasies, sÃ©ances, bank robberies, lynchings, murder, romance, circuses, and skyscrapers. Itâ€™s a grand tapestry of the American experience in an age of transition from rural to urban, with our nation perched on the precipice of the Great Depression.

Crossing Eden

Literary

Regency College senior Julian Brehm's uneventful student life is derailed when he falls for Nina Rinaldi, a beautiful young revolutionary engaged in political activism against the authoritarian regime that rules the country and wages a deceitful, distracting war. Julian's love for -- and moral alliance to -- Nina eventually leads him into a vast undercity beneath the metropolis. Then, east by train and into the war zone itself, where mortal danger in that expanding cemetery of millions threatens Julian's life; what he witnesses will alter how he perceives the Republic and ultimately his fate within it. Julian's adventure can be seen as our own, a world of vacillating morality and unceasing violence. Apathy and passion. Fear and courage of purpose. Julian's is a hero's journey into the dark unknown. A love story, which extends in many directions. A war novel of incredible scope and horror. A suspenseful mystery novel with a moral puzzle at its core. And a coming-of-age tale of a young man seeing the world he was born into, more dangerous and more beautiful than he could have ever imagined. Metropolis is a meditation on the meaning of virtue and goodness in the face of the most monstrous crimes. It could just as easily be the story of us.

Metropolis

The Fifth Fedora: Weird Noir & Stranger Tales

Engstrom, Elizabeth

Witchey, Eric

Talley, Max

Vessels, Stephen T.

Reed, John R.

Webb, Silver

Eidt, Jack

Lay, Christina

Knight, Maryanne

Short Stories & Anthologies

Independently published

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Books by Schulz, Monte