Elliott Foster

Panic River Elliott Foster

Struggling artist Corey Fischer is in big trouble. A lifetime of deference and masked inner-feelings has blinded him to the truth in others, even as those truths emerge onto the canvas of his paintings. The sudden death of his estranged father brings Corey downriver to his hometown of Pepin, Wisconsin, where he confronts past and present torments. The taunting inheritance of a pair of hunting rifles from his dead father, together with a lukewarm reunion with his mother, launches an unraveling of the tenuous ties binding Corey's life together. The inheritance delivers Corey and his husband, Nick, to the Fischer family cabin in northern Wisconsin during hunting season where they head into the woods with loaded guns and years of simmering resentment. Emotions explode as the couple tracks a wounded eight-point buck at dusk and as Nick's betrayals are accidentally revealed. Corey makes a series of panicked, life-defining choices that propel him to flee the trail of destruction his life has wrought and to seek comfort from those who loved him all along.