"Can you go home again? The eternal question for small town America. And one posed by the picaresque novel The Redneck Waltz by Maryland writer Howard Smead. It is the question that the young protagonist Billy Wagon must confront when he returns to his hometown of Billingsgate snuggled in the Appalachian foothills of Western Maryland. It is the early 1970's. He has been in the army for four years in Germany. now he has come home and is eager to take up where he left off. It's party time! But things have changed, as they have a way of doing. His best friends are working. Their lives are relatively settled. One is a deputy sheriff, with an "instant" family. The other works on the assembly line at the local Mack Truck plant and has a steady girlfriend, for whom Billy develops an immediate, libidinous attraction. To top it off, Billy's father, who was once a famous and respected high school football coach, is back in town. Billy hasn't seen him in ten years since the Coach abandoned his family. He and his father "were not exactly Ward and the Beaver," as Billy puts it. And their reunion strains an already strained situation. The town is located eleven miles south of the Mason Dixie Line, the traditional boundary between North and South. But its people have more in common with the rugged mountain folk of West Virginia. As Billy's father tells him, "For the people in Billingsgate it isn't good enough to be successful, to have money an' all. They have to see their neighbors fail 'fore they're happy. They're straight-laced, jealous and suspicious as the devil." Though only 70 miles from Washington, D.C., the town has remained isolated by choice and the culture is as permeated by violence as any rural hamlet in the Deep South" --jacket flaps.