Tristan Egolf, a promising young fiction author who grew up in a working-class Pennsylvania town, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head on May 7 in Lancaster. He was 33 years old and friends said he had shown signs of depression over the past 18 months.
His first published novel was "Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt" (1998).
Egolf submitted the book to over 70 U.S. publishers without any luck. It was finally printed by a French publisher while Egolf was working as a street musician in Paris at age 27. The book became a best-seller and garnered critical praise comparing Egolf to Faulker, Steinbeck and John Kennedy Toole.
The novel begins with the death of a woolly mammoth in the last Ice Age and concludes with a greased-pig chase at a funeral in the modern-day Midwest. In the interim there are two hydroelectric dam disasters, fourteen tavern brawls, one shoot-out in the hills, three cases of probable arson, a riot in the town hall, a lone tornado, a coven of Methodist crones, an encampment of Appalachian crop thieves, six renegade coal-truck operators, an outraged mob of factory rats, a dysfunctional poultry plant, and one autodidact goat-roping farm boy by the name of John Kaltenbrunner. Lord of the Barnyard is a comic tapestry of a Middle America populated by assembly-line drones and poultry-plant neckslicers, measuring into shot glasses the fruits of years of quiet desperation on the factory floor. It is a plea for nothing more than the minimal respect owed to the most forgotten blue-collar workers of the global proletariat, and a word of warning that respect denied can go much farther than postal.
Egolf's other published novel was "Skirt and the Fiddle" (2002), a frenetic love story. A third novel, "Kornwolf," about a werewolf in Amish country, is scheduled for release next year. At the time of his death Egolf had been fine-tuning the screenplay for "Lord of the Barnyard" and had just finished a rock opera.
