Slaughter

Spring, 1941 While Germany wages war overseas, in the small farming community of Wakarusa, Indiana, fifty-seven-year-old slaughterhouse owner Harold Jackson is on the verge of losing his business. In a desperate attempt to save his farm and the slaughterhouse, he has mortgaged his property and used the money to place an illegal bet on the Triple Crown series of races and a horse named Slaughter. Overworked and overcome with anxiety over finances and guilt following the death of his son Ronald, Harold Jackson is slowly losing his sanity. He's hearing a voice inside his mind, and as tension over the races builds, his insanity manifests in the form of a murderous talking pig named Homer. Though the pig exists solely in Harold's imagination, he emerges as a separate entity. Set in 1941 amongst the wealthy horseracing community in Lexington, Kentucky and in the struggling family farms of Indiana, Slaughter evokes a time and a place and tells a parallel tale of the madness that guilt induces and its possible outcomes. What if E. B. White had written Silence of the Lambs instead of Charlottes Web? Get a 'taste' of what that might have been like in Marcus F. Griffin's Slaughter.