Set in the dreamscape of the Kaats Kills, The Runaway Note is the fragmented story of two star-crossed lovers as they steal the devil’s van, resurrect a dead boy, and re-experience their past lives. A pastiche of surreal romance, epistolary, and tall tale, the book takes the reader on an alternatingly whimsical and gruesome tour of youth, home, violence, time, and death. At once funny and menacing, inventive and human, The Runaway Note manages to find tenderness in the face of the inevitable end.
"The Runaway Note is a runaway dream, a dream that keeps breaking upon itself and somehow, in the breaking, becomes more and more shapely and serendipitous. The dream contains familiar literary players--a female lead who's part femme fatale and part damsel in distress, a mean imperious bearded interloper, a lost and rebellious protagonist--but the aspirations they harbor toward love and hope seem unfamiliar mostly because they're so large. These people, to their peril, are better at dreaming than we are, and this book comes on like an interesting stranger with no manners. The characters are in orbit. Above them circle vultures. Below them, fish do laps around a flooded old town. Jaeger's folks are hyper-aware of their common destiny, which is to become fossils, and they want their souls to leave a mark in addition to their bones. Maybe that's what this thing is up to the whole time: assigning value to the souls of the wonderful and tortured." --John Brandon, author of A Million Heavens, Arkansas and Citrus County"
In The Runaway Note, Tyrone Jaeger has crafted a remarkable mosaic of sentences, each a surprise, each in oblique dialogue with those before and after. Often aphoristic on their own, collectively they lead the reader through an oneiric, fable-like story, of delightfully unpredictable twists and turns." --Stanley Crawford, author of Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine and Some Instructions to My Wife
"You may think these hard, glowing gemstone fragments have rained down from a hallucination, a dream or nightmare, but they are messages from another world. The powerful medium Tyrone Jaeger has pieced together his own strange testament, a personal Bible full of riddles, revelation, visions, and terrible adventure." --Jack Pendarvis, author Your Body is Changing and The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure
"Tyrone Jaeger's The Runaway Note is a violent and mystical record of a recurring nightmare brought on by reading Flannery O'Connor and Frank Stanford. Coyotes are running across the dam. The moon is murderous. The difference between the living and the dead is not the capacity for love. And I now know this is what happens when you die: you wake up, and you ask for forgiveness." --Zachary Schomburg, author of FJORDS, vol. 1 and Scary, No Scary
