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A Feature Review of
Hold the Dark: A Novel
William Giraldi
Hardback: Liveright, 2014
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Reviewed by Martyn Jones.
I come to a strange, recurring realization about my surroundings, be they rural, suburban, or urban in character: Every square inch within view has been shaped according to a human plan. Walking in Chicago or Madison, I wonder at the streetlights and sewer grates: each designed to fit in the scheme of the whole, each produced by a mind working to impose further order upon its world.
This remains true in the fields and woods where I grew up in semi-rural Ohio. Trees rise to the sky out of carefully allotted parcels of earth; woods darken the horizon only where someone hasn’t seen fit to develop the ground for some other purpose. Nature across the Midwest is mapped into a grid that is subject to the will of the invisible hand. For all the parks, creeks, and forests, finding a place that is remote—truly distant and out of reach—is difficult.
This foregrounds the quality that immediately caught me about Hold the Dark, William Giraldi’s literary thriller set in the Alaskan tundra: a feeling of extreme remoteness. This feeling takes hold in the first paragraph and does not abate. The language is almost biblical in its simplicity: “The wolves came down from the hills and took the children of Keelut.” It practically begs to have a scriptural refrain appended: “In those days, the wolves came down…”
Giraldi’s dark story never makes a decisive return to the pedestrian world of modern civilization. Characters survive at the edge of known things and experience thralls, ecstasies, and horrors unknown to even the most passionate and violent who remain within the boundaries of the well-mapped world. The flecks of snow that fall across the title on the dust jacket appear like stars, and this is fitting: Both the snow that falls in these regions and the suns of distant galaxies are impossibly far away to the person who drives on paved roads and buys food at a grocery store under rows of fluorescent lights.
After several children are killed in a far-off Alaskan village, a grief stricken mother writes wolf expert Russell Core and asks him to visit in order to find her son and kill the wolves that took him. Core leaves his aging and delirious wife in a nursing home bed and ventures out to the tiny village of Keelut to investigate.
Welcomed into the home of Medora Slone, mother of the most recently deceased boy, Core is ambivalent about his task until, in a moment of abject horror, he discovers the body of the child he has been asked to avenge. Slone has by this point disappeared, and Core becomes involved in a police operation across the wilderness in pursuit of the truth about the death of the boy as much as in pursuit of the fugitive woman.
Medora isn’t the only Slone, however. Her husband Vernon, a soldier fighting in the Middle East, comes back to Alaska to discover that his son has died, and with his quietly terrifying friend Cheeon he also goes in pursuit of Medora. Violence and rumors of violence go out in front of them and follow behind them; we are acquainted time and again with the color and behavior of blood upon asphalt, concrete, and snow as the contents of human bodies are released upon an indifferent earth.
There are at least two ways to read this book. You can fly through it in a day or two, careening forward with all the power and speed of Giraldi’s propulsive story behind you, or you can restrain yourself in order to savor his sentences, which are full of vivid and gripping description. This is brightly-colored action prose, verbs and nouns tumbling down to create images that whip out and away from you, blood-specked and powder-singed:
The rounds came faster than he’d ever seen or heard. He could see the flame from the long barrel in the attic window. It pivoted smoothly up and down, right and left, attached to a tripod. […] The windshields and windows of the trucks were shattering, spraying over Marium, the men, the ground. Air hissing from shot tires. Rounds clunking into engine blocks, dull but loud like hammer hits.
The violence that breaks out again and again is, initially, understandable under the aspect of vicious criminality: sociopaths who kill for fun, perhaps, or sport. As the book progresses, however, a new kind of darkness falls. Strange prophecies are uttered; masks are donned; the wolves that live in the woods become messengers forever arriving from some unknowable spiritual province.
Evil in a purer form breaks in here, at the very edge of what is known. The territory that Core and police detective Marium traverse is a barren wilderness, but this isn’t true in geographic terms only. The tenuous claims of civilization have never taken hold in this land; we slowly realize that we are lost in a metaphysical tundra, and every assumption of value, order, and intelligibility have no purchase under these powder-crested trees. At one point near death, Core reflects on “the anguish of this place, all those snowed-over acres accountable to nothing.”
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