Overview
When big corporate coal strip-mining interests begin to take over a ranching town in southeastern Montana--wide-open coulee and bluff country--all hell breaks loose. It seems the land is fighting back: vast sage flats erupt in fire, massive storms blast down from all directions, rattlesnakes strike from out of nowhere, and an extinct buffalo wolf is heard howling in the night. One man tries to hold back the tide of disaster caused by corporate greed: Joe Graves, a rancher whose family has farmed this arid, harsh land for generations.
Graves knows the land better than anyone, hunting and fishing its broad acres all of his life. He considers the land an extension of himself. What he doesn't know is that his father sold the mineral rights to the ranch-and Graves is about to find out that Dark Star (the corporate coal giant) is coming to claim those rights along with his water. What Dark Star doesn't realize is that it will have more than just a mere man to fight--the very elements are set against them.
Steeped in atmosphere and electrically charged with emotion and suspense, this graphic, shocking novel firmly establishes John Holt's authority as a novelist, and reveals his own dark vision of what "civilization" is doing to the West.
Synopsis
A seething novel about the consequences--natural and supernatural--of corporate greed in the High Plains of the American West.
Publishers Weekly
A third-generation rancher goes up against a corporate behemoth in this eloquent if preachy novel by Holt (Montana Fly-Fishing Guide; Coyote Nowhere-In Search of America's Last Frontier). Joe Graves is a self-sufficient loner born on a stormy night in the back of a pick-up truck. For decades, his family has struggled to survive in arid southeastern Montana, becoming intimately acquainted with the land and its fauna. When the nefarious and aptly named Dark Star corporation comes nosing around the Graves property, Joe discovers that his father sold the family's mineral rights before he died, and Dark Star is now interested in strip-mining the ranch for coal. Insult is added to injury when Mickey, the closest thing Joe has to a lover, leaves him for Dark Star's representative. As he battles the corporation seeking to destroy his rural heaven, Joe must also fight his urge to lose control and revenge himself on those who have interrupted his life. He is, as his enemies define him, "on a long-term, slow burn that could ignite at any moment at the slightest provocation." But it is nature that deflects the corporation in the end, erecting a series of incredible obstacles, like spontaneously combusting flora, ferocious storms and irate rattlesnakes. The novel is unashamedly polemical, and Joe's self-righteousness can be grating, but Holt's spare prose and fierce, gritty descriptions of hunting and violent weather rescue his story from one-dimensionality. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
A third-generation rancher goes up against a corporate behemoth in this eloquent if preachy novel by Holt (Montana Fly-Fishing Guide; Coyote Nowhere-In Search of America's Last Frontier). Joe Graves is a self-sufficient loner born on a stormy night in the back of a pick-up truck. For decades, his family has struggled to survive in arid southeastern Montana, becoming intimately acquainted with the land and its fauna. When the nefarious and aptly named Dark Star corporation comes nosing around the Graves property, Joe discovers that his father sold the family's mineral rights before he died, and Dark Star is now interested in strip-mining the ranch for coal. Insult is added to injury when Mickey, the closest thing Joe has to a lover, leaves him for Dark Star's representative. As he battles the corporation seeking to destroy his rural heaven, Joe must also fight his urge to lose control and revenge himself on those who have interrupted his life. He is, as his enemies define him, "on a long-term, slow burn that could ignite at any moment at the slightest provocation." But it is nature that deflects the corporation in the end, erecting a series of incredible obstacles, like spontaneously combusting flora, ferocious storms and irate rattlesnakes. The novel is unashamedly polemical, and Joe's self-righteousness can be grating, but Holt's spare prose and fierce, gritty descriptions of hunting and violent weather rescue his story from one-dimensionality. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.From The Critics
--Robert F. Jones, author of The Run to Gitche Gumee