Sensational stories in the finest tradition of American craftsmanship, DOG RUN MOON signals the arrival of Callan Wink, the latest inductee to the pantheon of contemporary compulsive page turners.
Nine muscular, robust stories, each one a gem of polished, precise prose, each one a towering edifice built on searing sentences and culminating in lasting, unforgettable characters and images.
The vastness of the Montana landscape and its big sky provides the backdrop, a monumental setting in which to take a scalpel to slice open the psychological minutiae of mere mortals, mostly male, as they traverse the tricky terrain of life.
From the opening story that gives the volume its title to the final tale, In Hindsight, a sweeping, epic novella, Wink weaves stories of ordinary lives into extraordinary physical and emotional journeys.
Being set in Montana, the shadow of Little Big Horn makes its presence felt more than once, but especially so in the third story, One More Last Stand, a story of strange bedfellows among historic re-enactors, a same time next year love affair, between Perry, a Custer impersonator and Kat, a native American woman.
She “rode him like she had stolen him and god himself was in pursuit”.
At seven years, they’ve been doing this for longer than either has been married, so he asks, “Doesn’t that beg the question: which is the marriage, which is the affair?”
It is as if their re-enactments are not infidelities to their respective spouses, but out-takes of history, although Perry at one point feels a scalped and bloody mess after a late night phone call with his wife.
In the story, Crow Country Moses, a father says to his son “I recognise my symptoms in you. You and I, we have a capacity for work, dedication, all that. It’s just that we suffer from the diffusion of desire.”
They are on a road trip, through Montana and Little Big Horn, “our first trip together since my mother’s death…..we never did find the Little Bighorn Battlefield, but truth be told, neither of us really cared that much about history.”
Ironically, the story is all about history, the father and the son’s personal history, as they putter about the small planet.
In Hindsight, the longest of the stories, hell, let’s call it a novella, seeing it’s got chapters and all, we follow Lauren from childhood to septuagenarian, an amazing distillation of description, character, incident and situation, and a whole lot more satisfying than many a long winded novel.
Without exception, each and every one of these coruscating compositions have “That crunch, something more felt than heard, gritty and uncomfortable, like chewing a piece of eggshell in your omelette.”
Wink’s writing is hotter than two rats screwing in a wool sock. You may want to take your skin off and read it in your bones.
Callan Wink’s DOG RUN MOON is published by Granta.
Featured photo- Michigan author Callan Wink.