Intriguing, and at times shocking, this book of short stories centers around the Western United States and the wildness and lawlessness that seems to breed there.
Each story stands alone but is also tied, at least in some small part, to a Constitutionalist uprising in a place called Redoubt. And btw, if you ever thought militia men were scary, this book will do nothing to quell your fears.
The only story that seems to truly stand alone as it happens a full century before our recent rumblings of succession is "The Dancing Bear" but even it demonstrates what happens to a man alone, a man apart. But the overarching feeling of man making his own choices, his inert wildness, his singular drive to be free connects in every story and makes the reader realize that there is always some level of succession happening to someone somewhere in any given space and time.
The book reminded me a lot of Cormac McCarthy's superb but troubling The Road. I can't name any book before or since that kept me awake at night like this one. And I can't help but think of our troubling political times and how intellectuals are constantly comparing it to great works of literature like 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Animal Farm, etc. In each of these novels, some horrible event has happened to our America and the protagonist is now living in the fall-out. Are these our current times? Have we all become the hero/heroine of our own novel in edge-of-collapse America?