In the wake of a presidential election where both candidates’ fervid speech- ifying took them back and forth across the good-ol’-boy American heartlands, the rugged swathe of territory that plays host to the characters in Mark Spragg’s finely crafted novel seems almost as familiar as my own reflection.
For the purposes of this quintessentially Great American Dream Fable, the reader finds himself transplanted straight back into the centre of that extensive splodge of gun-toting Republican red which dominated the TV pundits’ psephological maps, a remarkably beautiful backdrop for a novel centred around Yellowstone National Park, crowned by the ‘black and jagged’ Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, where, we are reliably informed, ‘men are men and the women smell like ’em’.
Protagonist Einar Gilkyson, an aging rancher of Scandinavian descent who orders his off-white longjohns from the ‘LL Bean catalog’, lives an austere kind of life with buddy from the Korean war ‘Mitch’ Bradley, a ‘chewed-to-shit’ black cowboy (he’s been almost mauled to death by a grizzly bear) who now survives on daily morphine shots administered by an uncomplainingly passive Einar.
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