George R. Justice

A compelling coming-of-age narrative. Part murder mystery, part family saga, and the chronicle of an Appalachian honed by habits and customs that often bewilder.

Greezy Creek is a story for both young and mature readers alike, its characters possessive of the threads that run through us all. Its universal appeal lies in its authenticity, where readers are taken behind the veil of a culture all but gone, but a time and place worth remembering.

Book Plot

greezy creek Background

Kentucky’s Appalachian Highlands (circa. 1930’s) is a world where habits and customs often bewilder: where the ties of kinship and ancestry hold to unswerving lines, and where enduring love stands as a bulwark against those hell-bent on opposing it.

A compelling coming-of-age narrative, part murder mystery, part family saga, Greezy Creek tells of an Appalachia honed by the unacquainted ways of the Scot-Irish hybrids cloistered in its deepest regions; where moonshiners leave incipient trails and the strains of hard times too often coalesce into the empty-eyed face of hardscrabble. It’s also a place where two childhood friends, Bobby Yonts and Rubin Cain (as good as brothers), come of age and test the limits of things new and out of bounds. But it’s the odious hand of cruelty that underscores the unraveling of their naivety and binds them to the unwritten code of the mountains, one which guarantees you’re going to get what’s coming to you.

Character driven with rich historical insights, Greezy Creek takes readers behind the veil of a family known for its fierce ingrained independence; a family bound by self-determination and all that’s necessary to survive. Yet, even from their bittersweet and ill-famed existence comes the imprint of their wit and wisdom, the uniqueness of their wilderness ways, and what it means to be bound by blood.

Bio & Story

Biography

Author, George Justice holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Detroit. He has been published three times for short stories, twice for poetry, and was the movie critic for Oakland County’s Daily Tribune (1978-79). As a U.S. Army veteran, he wrote numerous articles (from human interest to military) for Stars and Stripes. He is the father of two, the grandfather of two, and with an extended family of over 200 in the hills of Kentucky who serve as the cornerstones to this story. He and his wife reside in Ferndale, Michigan. Greezy Creek is his first novel.

author footnote

In the telling of Greezy Creek, it was my objective to introduce readers to a time and place as authentic as America itself; to tell of an Appalachia seeded with both fault and forgiveness, with as much mystery as candor, where bloodlines are not to be dismissed, and its people as hard-knocked as the crags and hollows they know as home. Having been born to its austerity, I grew up knowing that it was a world set apart, one in which only a few can claim to know intimately…and one in which I felt obliged to bring to the page and to the world.

My story

I was born in Pikeville, Kentucky, in 1944, in the old Methodist Hospital that sat halfway up a mountain on the backside of town, its buildings now converted into classrooms as part of Pikeville University.

Detroit is where we ended up (where the work was anything but coalmining), and living in a one-room flat with a shared toilet down the hall. And though removed from the sights and sounds we knew as home, the inherent richness of Momma and Daddy’s storytelling kept me tuned to the mountains, moreover to Greasy Creek and its coarse and uneven ways.

Daddy was the oldest of twelve and Mamma from a family of faith healers and Primitive Baptist Preachers. Together their accounts wove a tapestry as real and rich as the earth itself. It’s from their accounts of Greasy Creek that I know firsthand what rails within its deep green valleys: what rankles and what inspires, what causes us to seethe and what begs for our forgiveness; what shakes us to the core of our funny bone, and what shamefully fastens itself to those who would embrace it. It is this background that I bring to Greezy Creek, that allows me to take readers into a world only few can know as their own.