KINGS OF THE EARTH by Jon Clinch, 2010.

Clinch's novel is a stark narrative of life, death, and family in a remote agricultural area of New York State.
   In 1990, three aged brothers, Vernon, Audie, and Creed Proctor live on their family's crumbling dairy farm in the middle of nowhere. It is their family home, they and their sister were raised by their parents on the land, and they still work the farm in the ways their father, Lester, taught them back in the previous decades, but the place is a decaying wreck, the house and barn hardly fit for habitation. Vernon, the eldest, is in charge; Audie, the middle son, is somewhat simple, and Creed, having been to Korea, has his own ideas about things. Their sister, Donna, the youngest child and only girl, has managed to escape the farm by attending school and becoming a nurse, and then marrying a man who had escaped his own father's "muddy onion farm." Donna visits her brothers regularly and tries to help them out, but their pride keeps them in their current situation, milking their cows, raising turkeys in an old school bus, making do with old machinery. It is a bleak and unrewarding life, but they know no other; even Creed, who has seen something of the world during his military service is drawn back to the farm. Donna's son, Tom, bonds somewhat with his mother's brothers, but he ends up using them to further his own business plans in growing marijuana on their place. Tom's father, discovering the marijuana and recognizing a good business opportunity, jumps in to help his son, and unknowingly sets in motion events that lead to tragedy.
   When Vernon, the eldest brother, is found dead in the bed they all shared and the police suspect murder, attention becomes focused on the Proctors and their land. Preston and Margaret Hatch, the men's lifelong neighbors, are sympathetic and supportive of the brothers, even though they don't understand them. When Creed and Audie are actually brought up for questioning by the police, Preston tries to help them, and Donna and her family are drawn in as well. As the story moves back and forth in time, the reader gets a sense of how these three men were raised, how they matured,  why they became the people they are in the present, and the interconnected events that envelope all the characters.
   Overall, it's a story of family ties, and of the bonds that can exist between unrelated folk, told in spare and often harsh language, with stark scenes and realistic characters who have weathered hard times with very little love or emotional warmth. Clinch's descriptions are such that reader can feel the chilling air coming through the farmhouse's cracks in winter, hear the howling winds, and smell the wildflowers in the fields of the countryside. Clinch's uncluttered prose is unflinchingly honest, and provides the reader with a gritty look at a family that even though it suffers and tears at itself from within, the bond of blood between its members remains unbroken. While I can't say I really enjoyed this novel, it's definitely a thought-provoking and challenging story.