Yonder Stands Your Orphan

by Barry Hannah

Published 26 June 2001

'A tour de force of dark humour... all wrought in the kind of eloquently twisted prose for which this southern Gothic master brooks no peer' Elle

'A literary event . . . The welcome return of a brilliant writer. . . . [A] blunt, unvarnished vision of the human species.' New York Times


Yonder Stands Your Orphan is an electrifying story about how the denizens of a lakeside community in Mississippi are beset by madness, murder and sin in the form of Man Mortimer. Mortimer, a creature of the casinos who looks like the dead country singer Conway Twitty, is a killer who has turned mean and sick. He visits upon the town by EagleLake wreckage of biblical proportions.
Yonder Stands Your Orphan is a tour de force. It is an hysterical and unremittingly gothic account of obsession, violence, sex and religion in America's Deepest South.
'A sensibility that is truly sui generis... Yonder Stands Your Orphan is three hundred and thirty-six pages of supreme aesthetic bliss' Wall Street Journal