TOM'S CROSSING

Danielewski turns from postmodern confections to a decidedly untraditional take on the Western.

Kalin March is the new kid in the tidy Utah town of Orvop (read Provo). There, because he’s wearing odd shoes—“like a moccasin, only too worn for even the poorest Indian, and blue, though a blue faded to near gray, with leather laces and rubber soles”—he’s bullied by football star Lindsey Holt, whose best friend is the smart, mischievous Tom Gatestone, who “weren’t ever a brutal boy.” Kalin wins their respect for two reasons: He can’t fight, but he doesn’t run; and, though small for his age, he’s a master on horseback. Therein lies the nub of Danielewski’s long, long story, which commences with the promise of “so much awful horror” occasioned by two horses, Navidad and Mouse, slated for slaughter by local patriarch Orwin Porch, “or Old Porch as he was called, though he weren’t but fifty-nine.” Kalin steals the two death-bound horses and heads into the mountains above Orvop, having promised Tom, who has died of a terrible cancer, that he would free them. Apologies for that spoiler, which takes place in the opening section, but Tom will become an important presence later in the narrative, a ghostly guide through the impassible mountains, even as Tom’s living sister, Landry, catches up to Kalin and partakes in a slowly unfolding adventure that involves a whole lot of bloodshed. With echoes of The Iliad and a body count to rival Blood Meridian, morphing from Western to horror to police procedural and back again, Danielewski’s yarn is carefully plotted and imaginatively written. Its only flaw is its excessive length, as if the author were in a race with William T. Vollmann; at only a couple of dozen pages shorter than War and Peace, it serves as a pointed lesson in the fact that life—as so many of Danielewski’s characters discover—is short indeed.

Overstuffed, but a daring foray into a genre that’s seen little recent experimentation.