Hanging Fields

Joel is home. Back from a tour of the desert with a brutal secret. Life collapsing. Mind unravelling. Menacing calls and texts say they know what he did. Stalking cars threaten worse. Finding himself buried in a sadistic world of dog-fighting, military drugs and cult abuse, he’s engulfed in a paranoid rage so intense it endangers those around him.

Yet why do those around him pose greater danger? Like Ryan, his half-brother, a quiet and intelligent young man who feels his life is already mapped out. No money, no job, no future. And now Joel is home and threatening to take the only things Ryan cherishes—his girlfriend, his mother, his home—and raze them to the ground.

For Joel and Ryan, cruelty and betrayal become their only means of survival.

HANGING FIELDS is the exhilarating story of one man trying to escape his fate and one man hurtling toward his.

Steven Maxwell has created a tiny British masterpiece in the world of unemployed hoodlums, single mothers, and returning war vets. Haunted by a society that rejects them and finding solace in a world of online snuff videos, computer video games, and the constant hum of horror videos and real life crime news stories, two half brothers try desperately to regain some sense of control over their lives. Unable to deal with the many layers of despair coating the bottom of British society, both brothers careen towards each other as they try to find something to believe in and something to hold on to, something which turns out to be their mutual hatred for each other. Reminiscent of classic youth-gone-wild teensploitation stories from the early 60s, Mr. Maxwell deftly relocates the desperate downward spirals of those archetypal young men into today’s world of ubiquitous cell phones and near constant texting, creating a timeless tragedy for today.