The Power Of The Dog
by
Thomas Savage
Read April and May, 2007
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Public Library, Maplewood branch
Essay written June 28th, 2007
Wow. This is what I have been looking for in a Western for fifteen years. When I was a teenager I went through a phase where I read Westerns for a while. Louis L'Amour and Luke Short particularly. And you know, your garden variety paperback westerns. I don't know where this interest came from.
But I fell out of interest in it before long. Went to college, got into bestsellers (Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Robin Cook) which I'm ashamed of now. Somewhere around the turn of the century I got out of that habit and discovered more meaningful reading. Literature, yes, but also your underground "alt"-lit writers. Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Thomas Pynchon, that kind of thing. The kind of writing that is hard to describe to mainstream bestsellers-reading people. "No, I haven't read The Da Vinci Code. No, I haven't read the Harry Potter books." And so on.
The idea of Westerns still appealed to me, but I didn't think Louis L'Amour would satisfy my grown-up nonlinear mind anymore. I figured there had to be some kind of convergence of the two worlds -- Westerns and "alt"-lit -- but I had no idea what it was.
The answer is Thomas Savage. I can't vouch for his other novels, but The Power Of The Dog is a book I had been looking for for a long time.
The Power Of The Dog is spellbinding. The plot engages you, maybe not from the first paragraph like the back-cover copy claims it will, but certainly once the stage is set. Such compelling, colorful characters. Such sinister imagery. It's possible to love or to hate every character in this book. It all pulls together to leave you haunted and changed. Wow.
The afterword, by Annie Proulx, mentions a few other authors who write in this vein and I totally need to check them out. But I forgot to write the names and titles down before I returned it, so I'll have to hunt it down one of these days at the library and get that information. It's practically impossible to find out anything online about Thomas Savage or this book. A few sparkling reviews like this one and that's about it. No suggestions of related books. (Truth be told, I didn't look at Amazon or commercial websites like that. Perhaps I should.) Wikipedia didn't even have an entry for Thomas Savage. At least, not this Thomas Savage. There's another one.
Read this book.
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