Novella 2 of Tales From Blue Springs: A Southern Gothic Romance
 
The second act of Tales From Blue Springs reveals the horrible past of Gerald Hardy, The Hook Man— a victim of gruesome work accidents at the automobile plant left him with a peg leg and hook-hand. His wife and child murdered, Gerald is now a criminal suspect. Now living in hiding in the woods of Blue Springs, magical and mystical happenings cheer the possibilities and impossibilities of life.
 
Review
“Magical, mythical, musical, metaphysical, and metallurgical—pun intended—The Hook Man harkens back to the old expression describing the rare occasion when the sun stubbornly stomps its foot and insists to shine in spite of the temper of the thunderstorm: ‘the devil’s beating his wife!’  R. Garth’s sequel to The Hatchet Woman similarly gleams and glooms in an admirable admixture of fact, fiction, fantasy, and, yes, even feces.  The Hook Man hooks the reader into story progression and back story to ultimately explode into a cosmic culmination of simultaneous cheers and tears about both the possibilities and impossibilities of life.”
 
Bebe  Gish Shaw, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Athens State University
Staff Critic, The Reading Paradigm:  A Journal of the Alabama Reading Association