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Summary
Summary
At the start of another pitiless winter, the wolves have come for the children of Keelut. Three children have been taken from this isolated Alaskan village, including the six-year-old boy of Medora and Vernon Slone.
Stumbled by grief and seeking consolation, Medora contacts nature writer and wolf expert Russell Core. Sixty years old, ailing in both body and spirit, and estranged from his daughter and wife, Core arrives in Keelut to investigate the killings. Immersing himself in this settlement at the end of the world, he discovers the horrifying darkness at the heart of Medora Slone and learns of an unholy truth harbored by this village.
When Vernon Slone returns from a desert war to discover his son dead and his wife missing, he begins a methodical pursuit across this frozen landscape. Aided by his boyhood companion, the taciturn and deadly Cheeon, and pursued by the stalwart detective Donald Marium, Slone is without mercy, cutting a bloody swath through the wilderness of his homeland. As Russell Core attempts to rescue Medora from her husband's vengeance, he comes face to face with an unspeakable secret at the furthermost reaches of American soil--a secret about the unkillable bonds of family, and the untamed animal in the soul of every human being.
An Alaskan Oresteia, an epic woven of both blood and myth, Hold the Dark recalls the hyperborean climate and tribalism of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone and the primeval violence of James Dickey's Deliverance.
Author Notes
William Giraldi is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark ; the memoir The Hero's Body ; and a collection of criticism, American Audacity . He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is master lecturer in the Writing Program at Boston University.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Giraldi makes a dark departure from his rollicking debut, Busy Monsters, with this tale of vengeance, which tracks an aggrieved man through the back country of Alaska. The novel starts out slow-and strange. Children are disappearing from the village of Keelut; locals think wolves are to blame. But when wolf expert Russell Core shows up to investigate, he makes a discovery: the body of the latest victim, Bailey Slone, strangled, and the boy's mother, Medora, missing from the scene. Vernon, Bailey's father, returns to town from military service overseas and goes on a maniacal rampage, brutally stabbing or shooting every cop and townsperson he encounters during his search for Medora. His boyhood friend Cheeon, a grizzled hunter even more dangerous than Vernon, joins him for part of the spree. Unfortunately, when the reason for Bailey's murder is finally disclosed, the big reveal feels more like a delayed gimmick than a genuine surprise. Still, if Giraldi set out to write an eerie portrait of depraved behavior set in the boonies, he certainly hit his target. Agent: David Patterson, Foundry Media. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A wolf expert travels to a peculiarAlaskan village to investigate a series of child murders.There's a bit of bait and switch going on in this murky, brittle novel. Theopening chapters lead you to believe this will be a wilderness-survival storycentered on Russell Core, an elderly expert on wolves whose field research onceled him to kill one of the great beasts. Carrying his grudging respect for theanimals, Core travels to the hamlet of Keelut at the behest of Medora Slone,whose 6-year-old son, Bailey, is the third local child to have been taken inthe night. After some impenetrable warnings from a local crone ("You would barthe door against the wolf, why not more against beasts with the souls of damnedmen, against men who would damn themselves to beasts"), Core investigates thelocal pack to find no evidence the boy was killed by wolves. Back at Medora'shouse, he finds that she's fled and quickly discovers Bailey's body buried inthe basement. The bulk of the book concerns Bailey's father, Vernon, a vet whoreturns home from an unidentified war and embarks on a killing spree withindistinct motives, with Medora seemingly marked as the final target. Core,meanwhile, is laid up with the flu for two weeks in a local hotel beforeconveniently being resurrected to serve as witness to the novel'sdenouement. Ultimately, the First Blood-like vigilante violence isunearned and confusing, while Core's participation seems the act of a literarywriter trying to bring emotional substance where little exists. Giraldi (BusyMonsters, 2012) is borrowing, less successfully, from the same well asCormac McCarthy and Daniel Woodrell, but the novel's affectation of style can'tsupport what is ultimately a gloomy and unsatisfying tale. A novel like this one that aspiresto greater meaning needs more than an assembly of hard men and noir idioms tomake it work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Some novels seem ready-made for Hollywood to gobble up and spin into a film script. Giraldi's second novel comes close to fitting this easy mold. However, despite how well he can write an action scene, his carefully developed themes and characters transcend the Hollywood model. When a village in the Alaskan Bush is ravaged by wolves, a mother calls in an outside wolf expert to hunt down her boy's lupine murderer. However, the mother's secrets turn out to be more sinister than the village's wolf problem; at least wolves kill out of necessity. These secrets, shared by her husband, who returns from war, drive the plot into an enigmatic chase for the boy's mother, father, and stolen body, a journey strewn with carnage and confusion. Written in a galloping prose embedded with a hard poetry, Hold the Dark will not disappoint disciples of action fiction.--McLaughlin, Tim Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EARLY IN WILLIAM GIRALDI'S fierce, extraordinary new novel, "Hold the Dark," the nature writer Russell Core tracks a pack of wolves deep into the Alaskan tundra. The wolves, it seems, have been taking children from a nearby village, and Core, a wolf expert, has been summoned by the latest victim's mother to "get her boy's bones and maybe slaughter the wolf that took him." After a bitter trek across a boreal "moonscape" Core spots the pack, "a frenzy of 10 gray wolves." But they're not feasting on the boy, as you both dread and expect. They're tearing at one of their own kind: "Through the field glasses he could see an infant wolf or coyote at the core of this ruck, teeth hooked into its flesh, the two largest wolves rending, angling for leverage, their hackles raised, the bounty shorn between them, snow mottled in purple and red." "Hold the Dark" is an unnerving and intimate portrayal of nature gone awry. It forces us to confront a menacing otherness that lies beyond the typical order of things. It's all but bereft of levity, spectacularly violent and exquisitely written. If dust jackets were more than paper and ink, this one would bear blood and frost. The story takes place in Keelut, Alaska, a remote "settlement at the edge of the wild that both welcomed and resisted the wild," where the parents of that missing boy, Medora and Vernon Slone, grew up together. Vernon is away fighting in a desert war when his son vanishes, and Keelut's villagers - out of both fear and respect - refuse to hunt the wolves. To make things right, Medora summons Core, who has seen wolves do this before and has written about killing one. Meanwhile, Vernon, injured in combat, learns of his son's fate while convalescing. Possessed of "a calmness masking an urge for carnage," he'll stop at nothing until he exacts a blood-thirsty vengeance. Giraldi, the fiction editor of the literary magazine Agni and the author of the novel "Busy Monsters," once wrote in a scathing review for this newspaper that "every book lives or dies by its language." If he's right, "Hold the Dark" should thrive. Giraldi writes with force and precision and grace, particularly when he trains his eye on Alaska's frozen landscape: "Like grief, cold is an absence that takes up space. Winter wants the soul and bores into the body to get it." Elsewhere, the book's killing scenes are relentless and visceral. Vernon fires his .50-caliber at an enemy, for example, "the rounds hacking off pieces of him as if from ax blows." The author also keenly portrays his characters' complex disturbances. Core, for instance, carries an ineffable guilt that plagues him with suicidal nightmares. "He'd never seen a daylight detail that could compete with midnight's verity," Giraldi writes. "The predawn dark never learned to lie." The "drug and battery felons" in Vernon's platoon fear his strange ferocity, his imperviousness to combat trauma. They sense that "the eclipse in him had been there since his start. His was the nightly sleep of the exhausted sane." "Hold the Dark" gives us vivid characters, hard men and women who speak the laconic language of rough places. Perhaps the most memorable is Cheeon, Vernon's childhood friend, a reticent, homicidal force. Midway through the book, he squares off with law enforcement, and a negotiator asks him to consider one of Vernon's victims, who "was retiring this year, moving to San Diego." Cheeon's flip reply affirms what "Hold the Dark" reminds us - that some folks and some places are simply best left alone. "San Diego, huh?" he says. "Never heard of it." 'Winter wants the soul,' Giraldi writes, 'and bores into the body to get it.'
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Giraldi's follow-up to Busy Monsters is set in a small Alaskan village at the winter solstice, and the harsh Arctic landscape serves as both physical and psychological backdrop for an unnerving tale that explores where and how human nature gives way to its opposite. After receiving a letter from Medora Slone, a young mother whose son has been recently taken by wolves, wolf expert Russell Core travels to the remote Alaskan village of Keelhut for reasons he doesn't fully understand. Arriving at the darkest time of the year, Core gradually comes to learn that the truth of the situation is far different-and far more sinister-than he could ever have imagined. And it will grow even darker after Vernon Slone returns from the Iraq War to find his son dead and his wife missing. VERDICT Giraldi's back-country Alaska is a savagely amoral place where the constant struggle for survival brings out the most elemental aspects of humanity. This work travels deep into the most ancient and primitive realms of being, offering an unflinching-and more than a little frightening-exploration of the domains of the unconscious that are more commonly the province of myth and fairy tale.-Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
