Fayetteville - Novelist Donald Harington, whose works set in fictional Stay More, Arkansas, probed the thin - or nonexistent - line between the ordinary and the surreal, has died at the age of 73.

Harington died Saturday in Fayetteville after several months of health problems.

His Newton County community of Stay More was populated with characters whose excesses were routine to fellow inhabitants of an Ozarks countryside recalled from Harington's boyhood summers in rural Madison County.

Harington said he wrote about hillbillies, "but my novels are not really hillbilly novels at all."

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