There's Something in the Back Yard

by Richard Snodgrass

From Publishers As this quirky modern fable begins, George Binns, laid-back English professor in Flagstaff, Ariz., finds what seems to be a masked Hopi Indian performing rituals in his backyard. Is this silent figure a kachina , or ancestral spirit, as local Hopis believe? Is it an Indian impersonator of a spirit, or maybe a prankster? This enigma is only one of Binns's worries. His bitter wife, a transplanted New Yorker like himself, is a heavy drinker whom his cooing girlfriend keeps pressuring him to leave; and his best friend, who's involved with his wife, is dying of cancer. This debut novel is a haunting, seductive, original story that grips the heart and the imagination as it counterposes the rootlessness and alienation from nature of the white characters to the Indians' powerlessness in the prevailing American culture. Snodgrass interweaves his own sardonic, modernized retellings of Hopi legends into his tale of marital woe.

330 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 24, 2009

About the author

Richard Snodgrass is the critically acclaimed author of the “Books of Furnass” Series, an eleven-volume set of novels that explores the hopes, disappointments, relationships, and betrayals that make up life in a fictional Western Pennsylvania mill town and its surrounding farmlands from the time of the French and Indian War to modern day. The eleventh book in the series, Torn, will be released on September 17, 2025.

Snodgrass is also the author of There’s Something in the Back Yard, published in 1989 by Viking, and praised by Jack Stephens of the Washington Post Book World who wrote, “Observe this mysterious book and be changed.” Other works by Snodgrass include: An Uncommon Field: The Flight 93 Temporary Memorial, published in September of 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Kitchen Things: An Album of Vintage Utensils and Farm Kitchen Recipes, published in 2013 by Skyhorse and named one of the year’s “best books to get you thinking about food” by the Associated Press.

Snodgrass’s short stories and essays have appeared in the New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, South Dakota Review, California Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is also a master photographer who has been artist-in-residence at LightWorks (University of Syracuse) and at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Richard Snodgrass lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with his wife Marty and two indomitable female tuxedo cats, raised from feral kittens, named Frankie and Becca.