In Lonesome Animals, Russell Strawl, a tormented former lawman, is
called out of retirement to hunt a serial killer with a sense of the
macabre who has been leaving elaborately carved bodies of Native
Americans across three counties. As the pursuit ensues, Strawl's own
dark and violent history weaves itself into the hunt, shedding light on
the remains of his broken family: one wife taken by the river, one by
his own hand; an adopted Native American son who fancies himself a
Catholic prophet; and a daughter, whose temerity and stoicism contrast
against the romantic notions of how the west was won.
In the vein of True Grit and Blood Meridian, Lonesome Animals is a
Western novel reinvented, a detective story inverted for the West. It
contemplates the nature of story and heroism in the face of a collapsing
ethos not only of Native American culture, but also of the first wave of
white men who, through the battle against the geography and its
indigenous people, guaranteed their own destruction. But it is also
about one man's urgent, elegiac search for justice amidst the craven
acts committed on the edges of civilization.
