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Claire Harris
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HOLD THE DARK

William Giraldi

In the stark Alaskan winter, timber wolf scholar Peter Curran has been summoned to investigate a wolf attack on a remote fishing village. Days later, First Lieutenant Matthew Ranick returns to Alaska from the Iraq war to discover his eight-year-old son murdered and his wife, Barbara, suspected in the boy’s death and on the run across the whited wilderness.
Unhinged, lunatic with the demons of grief and his remembrances of war, Ranick pursues his wife across a frozen wasteland, leaving a trail of his own atrocity. Called to protect Barbara from her husband’s wrath, Curran will slam into Ranick and into his own worst version of himself.

With a lyrical intensity and mythical reach reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, Hold the Dark expertly uncovers the poisoned psyches of three individuals bound by madness and fate in an unforgiving Alaskan landscape, a landscape that feels ancient, classically American of the farthest West, and very much of our time.

Few novelists possess William Giraldi’s power and precision of language, and in Hold the Dark those qualities are used to great effect, with an unflinching, poetic emphasis on the essence of violence, the enigma of evil, the wickedness of nature, and how war can contort a man into something monstrous. What beasts are we in our darkest hours, our dark nights of the soul? What carnage are we capable of? And what nightmares do the darkness hold, in places so brutal and mythic that they possess a power that both incorporates—and is larger than - the more well-known nightmares of our time? Hold the Dark - the first chapter of which was just published in Ploughshares to great excitement - is epic, unforgettable storytelling by one of our most dauntless and versatile writers.

William Giraldi is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Busy Monsters (W.W. Norton). He teaches at Boston University, is the Senior Fiction Editor for the journal AGNI, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review. He has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the category of Essays and Criticism, and has received a Pushcart Prize.
Available products
Book

Published 2014-09-01 by Norton / Liveright

Book

Published 2014-09-01 by Norton / Liveright

Comments

Maybe it all began with Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in 1938, but there is a variety of modern thriller, created these days by Robert Stone and Denis Johnson at their best, that delivers narrative thrust and beautifully composed sentences by the pageful even as it peels away the thin membrane that separates entertainment from art, and nature from civilization. Here’s…William Giraldi adding to the slender ranks of such masterly fiction…. [A] hypnotic and decidedly idiosyncratic story, a novel that certainly stands out as one of the decade’s best books of its kind, and one that deserves, because of its stylish flaunting of some of our darkest fears, a future readership. Read more...

Big praiseful brainy review in The Millions. (Compares him to Cormac McCarthy.) Read more...

A taut, muscular and often unforgettable journey into the heart of darkness. Epic, relentless, and beautifully realized.

France: Editions Autrement

Hold the Dark, Huff Post's best books of the fall. Read more...

Snow, ice, wolves, brutal murders and dark love are encountered in Hold the Dark, William Giraldi's hard, unflinching and powerful novel. This story and the telling of it have the clout and rigor of a Norse Saga.

Hold the Dark is a powerful meditation on nature, violence and responsibility with the concentration of a fable or fever dream--a book hard to get out of your mind long after you've put it down.

After his zany first novel, Busy Monsters, William Giraldi has gone over to the dark side with his Cormac McCarthy-like Hold the Dark, a brutal revenge tale. A dark, disturbing novel about the roots of evil and the paradoxical truths it can reveal.

What elevates this novel is the originality of its language. No cliches of the wild in these pages. There's an oddness and otherness to this place, and Giraldi speaks its taut, original language. To appreciate its power fully, Hold the Dark should be read closely — not so much for clues to the mystery, but rather for an appreciation of how language bridges worlds. Read more...