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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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LONESOME ANIMALS

Bruce Holbert

A startling, powerful debut novel about the hunt for a vicious killer in 1930s Washington state.
In LONESOME ANIMALS, Arthur Strawl, a tormented sheriff, is called out of retirement to hunt a serial killer with a sense of the macabre who has been leaving elaborately carved bodies of Native Americans across three counties. As the pursuit ensues, Strawl's own dark and violent history weaves itself into the hunt, shedding light on the remains of his broken family: one wife taken by the river, one by his own hand; an adopted Native American son who fancies himself a Catholic prophet; and a daughter, whose temerity and stoicism contrast against the romantic notions of how the west was won.

This is a western novel reinvented; a detective story, inverted for the west. It contemplates the nature of story and heroism in the face of a collapsing ethos not only of Native American culture, but also of the first wave of white men who, through the battle against the geography and its indigenous people, guaranteed their own destruction. It is also about one man's urgent, elegiac search for justice amidst the craven acts committed on the edges of civilization.

This is also Bruce's own story, drawing on his history Bruce grew up at the foot of the Okanogan Mountains in Washington State. His great-grandfather was an Indian scout and among the first settlers of the Grand Coulee. His grandmother ran a one-room schoolhouse and the family ranch until she retired in the mid-Sixties and his maternal grandparents were among the immigrants who traveled west for the promise of New Deal work on the Grand Coulee Dam. Bruce's father worked the last twenty years before his retirement operating a crane on the Dam.
In the vein of True Grit and Blood Meridian, Lonesome Animals is a western novel reinvented.
BRUCE HOLBERT is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop.
Available products
Book

Published 2012-05-01 by Counterpoint

Book

Published 2012-05-01 by Counterpoint

Comments

Lonesome Animals is exhilarating. The dialogue will blow your hair back, the description of land is prose poetry, and the violence is shocking for its intensity and sudden occurrence. This is a study of morality in a world that has lost its morals, a work that transcends its epic story of good versus evil. No character is spared and neither is the reader. Bruce Holbert's fierce novel will enter the canon as a classic.

Lonesome Animals is dark, beautiful, compelling, strange, vivid; part Western, part detective story, altogether brilliant. With the authority of myth, it is a book obsessed with justice and history, and its two main characters the retired lawman Russell Strawl and his prophet son Elijah are as harrowing and moving a marriage as I have read in years. It's an incredible book by an incredible author. It will break your heart and leave you gasping.

Lonesome Animals is an impure marvel. This cowboy noir is loaded with lyrical detail, black humor, and a kind of antic despair. At its center is the compromised lawman Russell Strawl, a pilgrim making slow progress through the blasted ruins of Western myth. He turns violence into a kind of brutal music and provides the weary, stubborn heart of this astonishing debut.

From the opening sentence of Holbert's remarkable debut, it is obvious that we are in the hands of a master storyteller...Call it literary fiction, classic western realism, or historical noir, Holbert is a writer of formidable skill and this auspicious debut should have considerable crossover appeal. Read more...