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Southern Revivals
Walk Me to the Distance
‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy’ – The New York Times
David Larson can never go home.
His parents are dead. His sister and her hippie husband, staunchly anti-war, won't even have the newly returned Vietnam veteran in the house. So Larson takes his chances on the road, travelling west from Georgia until he breaks down in the nowhere town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming.
There he finds lodging with Chloë Sixbury, a one-legged sexagenarian widow, and her disabled son. Their ersatz family is complete when Larson takes in Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at the highway rest stop where he works, but at the edge of this tableau lingers the unmistakable spectre of violence.
Blending the grotesquerie of the Southern Gothic with the Western's codes of frontier justice, in Walk Me to the Distance Percival Everett renders a vivid and haunting landscape of the American badlands, where cruelty is the lingua franca.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.
David Larson can never go home.
His parents are dead. His sister and her hippie husband, staunchly anti-war, won't even have the newly returned Vietnam veteran in the house. So Larson takes his chances on the road, travelling west from Georgia until he breaks down in the nowhere town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming.
There he finds lodging with Chloë Sixbury, a one-legged sexagenarian widow, and her disabled son. Their ersatz family is complete when Larson takes in Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at the highway rest stop where he works, but at the edge of this tableau lingers the unmistakable spectre of violence.
Blending the grotesquerie of the Southern Gothic with the Western's codes of frontier justice, in Walk Me to the Distance Percival Everett renders a vivid and haunting landscape of the American badlands, where cruelty is the lingua franca.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.
246 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1985
33 people are currently reading
1066 people want to read
About the author
Percival Everett
71 books8,978 followersPercival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 91 reviews
November 2, 2022
I enjoyed Percival Everett's latest novel, Trees, so much I decided to read all of his books. I had somehow gotten the idea that this author was too...what? Brainy, deep? Well, he is all that but he sure knows how to give the reader a good time!
Walk Me to the Distance is actually his second novel. It is a wonderful study of the disillusioned Vietnam vet and a deep dive into the Wild West that still existed on the plains of Wyoming in 1970s America.
Rough, with its own codes of behavior. Vast with its big sky. I met characters I will never forget: David, the veteran; Sixbury, a one-legged, widow-lady sheep rancher; and a little Vietnamese war orphan who gets dropped into the vet's lap.
From that point on it gets more complicated every day as the frontier code comes up against a changing world. The novel was the perfect follow-up to the last book I read, Ennemonde.
Walking to the distance is a saying that means walking as far as one can see across the plains.
Walk Me to the Distance is actually his second novel. It is a wonderful study of the disillusioned Vietnam vet and a deep dive into the Wild West that still existed on the plains of Wyoming in 1970s America.
Rough, with its own codes of behavior. Vast with its big sky. I met characters I will never forget: David, the veteran; Sixbury, a one-legged, widow-lady sheep rancher; and a little Vietnamese war orphan who gets dropped into the vet's lap.
From that point on it gets more complicated every day as the frontier code comes up against a changing world. The novel was the perfect follow-up to the last book I read, Ennemonde.
Walking to the distance is a saying that means walking as far as one can see across the plains.
May 23, 2025
A very humble, quiet novel with a lithesome arboreality to it. It’s nice to have a love story that doesn’t revolve around carnal rubby-rubby—there are too few of them. As only his second novel, it is better constructed than Suder and a crucial step toward his major evolution, Cutting Lisa. Not a bad accomplishment considering that the opening tableau of the novel is pretty much identical to First Blood. None of that Rambo hippie shit here, just a Vietnam vet acclimating without the assistance of an outrageously huge knife. File under: Aww.
June 20, 2017
A little short of one of my favorite Everett novels, for a couple different reasons. For one, having a developmentally disabled villain is cringe-worthy in 2017, and that's not a word I like to use in conjunction with Percival Everett but that's nonetheless where things are at. Plus it doesn't tie together its disparate threads - David's love for middle-of-nowhere Wyoming and his roommate Sixbury, David's sister's efforts to put him at the head of a Vietnam Veterans' rights group, the sudden appearance of a group of war orphans in Wyoming, the goings-on with said developmentally disabled villain... yeah, there's a lot going on here - as well as he did with later novels like Erasure or Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, nor does he buy the slight sense of disorganization with the picaresque approach of I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Yet David himself takes on a life of his own, and Everett has a deep understanding of his inner conflicts and impulses, and the guy's isolation in both his native Georgia and, as the novel goes on, his adopted home Wyoming are so real they'll bleed when you scratch them. This ultimately strikes me as a lesser work by a great author, but even then, it's worth your time. I don't know if Everett is quite the best living novelist in the United States, but he's definitely the best one that isn't frequently mentioned among that company.
October 15, 2011
I loved reading this book. It's the kind of stuff that you wish Denis Johnson would be capable of when writing about characters other than himself. A brutally honest, torn-open voice, shocked and aggrieved by the world but still adult and making do, carving out a place for itself. The voice is appropriate to the story, which centers on a young man returning from service in Vietnam and settling down quite randomly in a small town in Wyoming. Everett isn't afraid to oscillate unpredictably between comedy, violence, and emotional discomfort. The ending doesn't necessarily work, but who cares. I imagine Everett's intention was to evoke the feeling of the landscape of Wyoming in narrative and language, and he pulled it off.
September 13, 2025
Vietnam veteran David Larson returns to Georgia after the war, but is rejected by his anti-war sister, so he travels westward and finds himself stranded in Slut's Hole, Wyoming. He takes what he thinks is temporary lodging with Chloe Sixbury, a widow who runs a sheep ranch with her developmentally disabled adult son Patrick. David becomes the unwilling guardian of a seven-year-old girl abandoned by her mother. The storyline follows David’s struggle to find home and family.
The novel seems to be a satire of an American western that blends in elements of southern Gothic. Everett portrays the Wyoming landscape as a harsh environment where living can be difficult and cruel, and frontier codes of justice still exist. As a note of caution regarding the book’s description as “darkly humorous,” I did not find anything remotely funny in this book, especially due to its inclusion of Everett is a masterful writer, and I plan to read everything he has written, but this is one did not quite work for me.
The novel seems to be a satire of an American western that blends in elements of southern Gothic. Everett portrays the Wyoming landscape as a harsh environment where living can be difficult and cruel, and frontier codes of justice still exist. As a note of caution regarding the book’s description as “darkly humorous,” I did not find anything remotely funny in this book, especially due to its inclusion of Everett is a masterful writer, and I plan to read everything he has written, but this is one did not quite work for me.
September 4, 2025
... he wondered if a man actively seeking to surrender could be captured
4 stars for this line alone
4 stars for this line alone
November 5, 2025
Although, Percival’s trademark humor was muted in this second published novel, it still contains some zaniness in the narrative. I feel like he leaned into a satirical voice, maybe taking shots at the western novel genre. There are no clear racial designations inside these pages, and very little in the way of physical descriptions of characters. This was a light-hearted story with a touch of sadness as it involves a murder—ouch! The justification is debatable; some might view it as community justice, but the protagonist, David Larson, is compelled into hypocrisy.
David is an unusual character who seems to long for love but not really sure if the path to L o v e ! He settles in with an old sheep rancher named Sixbury, and he develops love for her, not the romantic type, but just the deep feeling of bonding and respect. A young girl is thrown into the mix, a Vietnamese orphan, perhaps to illustrate the ills of war with Vietnam. Anyway, I found the ending rather abrupt, and imagined several different conclusions. At the end of the day, it’s Percival Everett so it can’t be less than 4⭐️s!
David is an unusual character who seems to long for love but not really sure if the path to L o v e ! He settles in with an old sheep rancher named Sixbury, and he develops love for her, not the romantic type, but just the deep feeling of bonding and respect. A young girl is thrown into the mix, a Vietnamese orphan, perhaps to illustrate the ills of war with Vietnam. Anyway, I found the ending rather abrupt, and imagined several different conclusions. At the end of the day, it’s Percival Everett so it can’t be less than 4⭐️s!
October 15, 2025
“He watched the old woman hobble about. He studied her behind and thought of Patrick passing from the body of this sweet woman. Her strength moved him. He almost cried.”
Ever since there’s been a chill in the air and the nights are drawing in, I’ve been craving a gritty, dark and meaty read…Everett never lets me down. Walk Me to the Distance is reminiscent of Annie Proux’s writing, a narrative so detailed, nuanced and genius, and yet written with such delicious simplicity. It’s impossible to read one of Everett’s books and not ask yourself an abundance of questions about life, death, love, hate, endurance and pain, and ultimately the very lengths human beings will go to in order to survive.
Ever since there’s been a chill in the air and the nights are drawing in, I’ve been craving a gritty, dark and meaty read…Everett never lets me down. Walk Me to the Distance is reminiscent of Annie Proux’s writing, a narrative so detailed, nuanced and genius, and yet written with such delicious simplicity. It’s impossible to read one of Everett’s books and not ask yourself an abundance of questions about life, death, love, hate, endurance and pain, and ultimately the very lengths human beings will go to in order to survive.
August 13, 2020
What in the hell did I just read??! I don't even know how to rate this book. Brutal and perverse, wooden characters, choppy chapters, abrupt ending. Bizarre.
October 7, 2022
Walk Me to the Distance, Percival Everett's second novel, is a harder read than his first. I can envision some Suder fans having to reset expectations about this young author, and it is interesting to see that from the outset Everett was throwing curveballs and redefining genres.
Walk Me to the Distance reexamines the Western. It is spare and unsparing; no dashing heroes and clearcut villains here. The novel follows a Vietnam vet who has just returned from the war and ends up in Wyoming. Everett lets him live on a ranch, this is a Western after all, and there is a one-legged old woman and horses and a posse. But the vet is no cowboy; he finds work as a highway rest stop attendant.
The author is adept at letting the characters' words and actions define them, never succumbing to the temptation to add other explanations for the reader. Conversations are fragmentary and bounce around. A lot happens between chapters, between pages, between sentences.
I'm still percolating on this one. I'm currently rounding up to four stars from 3.5.
Walk Me to the Distance reexamines the Western. It is spare and unsparing; no dashing heroes and clearcut villains here. The novel follows a Vietnam vet who has just returned from the war and ends up in Wyoming. Everett lets him live on a ranch, this is a Western after all, and there is a one-legged old woman and horses and a posse. But the vet is no cowboy; he finds work as a highway rest stop attendant.
The author is adept at letting the characters' words and actions define them, never succumbing to the temptation to add other explanations for the reader. Conversations are fragmentary and bounce around. A lot happens between chapters, between pages, between sentences.
I'm still percolating on this one. I'm currently rounding up to four stars from 3.5.
April 20, 2022
Percival Everett may be the greatest novelist you've never heard of. I heard his name for the first time while watching the National Book Critics Circle awards last month, where he was given a lifetime achievement award. He has written a stack of books, and I got this particular one from the e-library because it was available. It is a modern Western. A Vietnam vet finds himself at loose ends and, by chance, in the minuscule Wyoming town of Slut's Hole -- so named by cowboys and never changed. The vet gradually finds a life, partly by conscious choice but mostly by falling into one unexpected set of circumstances after another. The writing is so skillful that every word of dialogue seems authentic and inevitable, even when it is outrageously improbable. This is a warmhearted book with sharp edges. I was impressed and want to read more.
July 17, 2025
Everett is hit or miss to me and this was a miss. It has all the pieces of an introspective, moody McCarthy-esque story about navigating PTSD as a veteran & dealing with disability in poverty. But it relies on shock value and contrivances that did not feel earned or needed. I see some reviews say the ending was abrupt but that’s where I disagree. The ending actually did feel earned to me but none of the middle did.
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November 16, 2025Early Percival Everett is just NOT it for me, holy smokes. 2 really weird sexual scenes and extremely irritating characters right off the bat and we are three strikes fam
Percy, we'll always have James.
DNF @ 12%
Percy, we'll always have James.
DNF @ 12%
Read
August 2, 2025What the heck did I just read?!? Need some time to process before I can even begin to think of a star rating. Beautiful writing, but so. much. evil.
June 12, 2023
I am continuing my read through the novel of Percival Everett. I haven't hit a clinker yet. This is his second novel. It was published in 1985.
David Larson has just come back from Vietnam. Everett explains that "he returned as unremarkable as he had been when he left." He doesn't feel right about going back to his hometown in Georgia so he heads off across country. He ends up with a busted radiator in Slut's Hole, Wyoming and decides to stay.
He slowly settles in. He gets a room with an older woman and her "retarded" son and a job tending to a highway rest area. He begins to get enmeshed into this remote world. The people are hard but friendly. They tend not to ask too many questions and he starts to feel comfortable.
Everett is excellent at capturing a character with a few laconic lines of dialog. He slowly weaves in the violence and dark sides of this world. Larson tries to be a good man, but the challenge gets very complicated, particularly when, almost by chance, he ends up responsible for a grammar school aged Vietnamese girl who gets abandoned at the rest stop.
This is the first of the six Everett novels I have read where the protagonist is not black. It is still, however, about a man who is an outsider trying to fit in.
This does not have as much of the humor of his more recent books, and it has none of the surreal or slapstick that is in them. This is a very well-done character study built on a strong story and a fully realized setting.
David Larson has just come back from Vietnam. Everett explains that "he returned as unremarkable as he had been when he left." He doesn't feel right about going back to his hometown in Georgia so he heads off across country. He ends up with a busted radiator in Slut's Hole, Wyoming and decides to stay.
He slowly settles in. He gets a room with an older woman and her "retarded" son and a job tending to a highway rest area. He begins to get enmeshed into this remote world. The people are hard but friendly. They tend not to ask too many questions and he starts to feel comfortable.
Everett is excellent at capturing a character with a few laconic lines of dialog. He slowly weaves in the violence and dark sides of this world. Larson tries to be a good man, but the challenge gets very complicated, particularly when, almost by chance, he ends up responsible for a grammar school aged Vietnamese girl who gets abandoned at the rest stop.
This is the first of the six Everett novels I have read where the protagonist is not black. It is still, however, about a man who is an outsider trying to fit in.
This does not have as much of the humor of his more recent books, and it has none of the surreal or slapstick that is in them. This is a very well-done character study built on a strong story and a fully realized setting.
March 28, 2025
When I was in @thecorshambookshop and saw a newly published Percival Everett, I had to buy it. And it's set in Wyoming, near Sundance and Gillette, where we were last year, in proper cowboy land, with beautiful and harsh landscapes, lives and stories. David has returned from the war - the Vietnam War, and he wants to be anywhere but where he's from...driving and ending up in Wyoming...where he makes a life with an old woman, the people of Sluts Hole and a little girl abandoned at a local rest stop. As always with his books, it is brilliantly written, from the first lone of the book you are drawn in, the characters are superb and the way of life described so well...hard and shocking and full of community when things go wrong...there is violence and western frontier justice, and ridiculous events, it is definitely the badlands...marvellous
#booksreadin2025 #bookrecommendations #bookreview #booksreviewersofinstagram #betweenthecovers #percivaleverett #picadorbooks @picadorbooks
#booksreadin2025 #bookrecommendations #bookreview #booksreviewersofinstagram #betweenthecovers #percivaleverett #picadorbooks @picadorbooks
November 27, 2025
Least woke Everett book award
November 24, 2024
I started my reading of Everett's books with his latest, James, have backtracked into several others, and hope to read everything in time.
This book has all the humor, mystique and tension of Telephone and Erasure. Early on, I was amused with the name of the town David lands in by accident: Slut Hole, WY. Very quickly the story evolves like a kaleidoscope into pathos, yearning, anger, confusion and even love, and back again. Like other of the author's novels, there is no resolution at the end. We are left to imagine what the characters' futures hold. Oddly enough, this is somewhat satisfying.
The writing style is spare and leaves much unsaid, absolutely appropriate to the subject matter, characters and wild west setting.
This book has all the humor, mystique and tension of Telephone and Erasure. Early on, I was amused with the name of the town David lands in by accident: Slut Hole, WY. Very quickly the story evolves like a kaleidoscope into pathos, yearning, anger, confusion and even love, and back again. Like other of the author's novels, there is no resolution at the end. We are left to imagine what the characters' futures hold. Oddly enough, this is somewhat satisfying.
The writing style is spare and leaves much unsaid, absolutely appropriate to the subject matter, characters and wild west setting.
March 13, 2024
Very good, very sad book. It features many of Everett’s trademarks but feels unique among his early novels, mostly because it’s just a stronger story with better characterization. There’s a lot of humor to be found, as usual, but it shines most in its quieter moments, and gives us a lot to wonder about when it’s done.
I’m glad I’m currently in the process of moving so I don’t have another one of Everett’s books within reach. If I did I would probably start it immediately and spoil myself.
I’m glad I’m currently in the process of moving so I don’t have another one of Everett’s books within reach. If I did I would probably start it immediately and spoil myself.
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March 27, 2016A super quick read, this one is gritty and a bit lurid. I enjoyed reading it, and even had a hard time putting it down. I wouldn't put it in my PE top 10 list, though.
August 22, 2023
There's a lot to contemplate here. I'm going to need some time to digest this.
October 30, 2025
There's something not right in this novel. We can start with the Viking "re-packaging", post Pulitzer win for Everett. Fine, they want to sell his books. Well, I got suckered in and I'm not pleased. I suppose one can go deep into why this book had problems, but this is not a deep novel. Everett can't do "human"...He can do satire and humor and when he does it, he's a friggin genius. This? I understand it was his second novel and there's no denying he can write but the way he uses characters or throws them away under the guise of some PTSD journey is wrong. I don't believe it, I don't believe the characters. Some of them do and say some unforgivable things and some suffer greatly, but you'd never know it. Lots of trite, sentimental garbage with awful violence tossed in for shock value. Everett is a button pusher - fine, but if you're gonna do it, do it right. Patrick was the one character Everett could have done right, because most of the people around him contributed to his downfall. Instead we get Lennie from Of Mice and Men by way of Frankenstein. What if the violent and sexual moments were taken out of the equation? Hmmm...This book was gross.
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December 10, 2023Walk Me to the Distance is dark. It has some similarities to Wounded, another of Everett's books. Of the books of his I've read, this is the least subtle study of human capabilities, of the anti-hero, a consistent theme of Everett’s.
I have to think more about this haunting story, before I care to say more. It leaves a lot for the reader to resolve.
I have to think more about this haunting story, before I care to say more. It leaves a lot for the reader to resolve.
October 17, 2025
Percival Everett's Walk Me to the Distance will surely haunt me for a while with its quirky characters and their unlikely alliances. David, a Vietnam veteran who hails from Georgia, winds up in rural Wyoming. He knows no one there, and is repeatedly asked why he doesn't have a Southern accent. He boards with Sixbury, a wise older woman who has a mentally retarded grown son living with her. Although he doesn't really need to get a job, David takes one maintaining a highway rest stop. One day while he is working, a Vietnamese woman abandons a small girl there. David and Sixbury wind up taking the girl in. Everett includes graphic, difficult sex scenes in this book, as well as violence.
September 3, 2025
Everett is such a fine, clever and original writer. This story is about a young Vietnam veteran, David Larson, and his life after service. He is a likeable but complex. He is generally a very sensitive and kind person, but he can also be mean and violent. He meets some very interesting people and encounters joy and pain and difficult decisions. I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend.
July 3, 2025
Exceptional. Everything Percival Everett writes is pure class. This story of frontier justice in the American West, set against the aftermath of the Vietnam War, is an exceptional piece of work from Everett. This early novel is a sign of how good he is as a storyteller. It’s also interesting to see how he would develop stylistically over time.
November 15, 2025
more like 3.5 because the end was quite hauntingly beautiful
i like his later works more but this still had a lot of beauty and value. notions of belonging, found family, love security, personal and political and various regional realities.
i like his later works more but this still had a lot of beauty and value. notions of belonging, found family, love security, personal and political and various regional realities.
August 6, 2025
Despite covering some of the worst things that can happen to a human being - child rape, war, murder and disability, this felt like a very gentle book. I very much enjoyed it.
November 3, 2025
I wasn’t prepared for the horrific depiction of a child’s rape or the brutal punishment of a man with a mental disability. Like many of Everett’s works, the writing is skillful and compelling, and I understand that the novel is meant to be a darkly humorous satire of the American Western. Still, the subject matter felt too heavy and unsettling for me to fully appreciate this one.
November 1, 2025
Everett's second novel is closer to the cooler tone and geography in Wounded or Assumption than it is to the zaniness of Suder or Sidney Poitier. He still explores the absurd through the family that Larson cobbles together (a widowed rancher and a Vietnamese orphan), but it's more like a Flannery O'Connor story in its gothic-ness. I thought Larson's trip back to Atlanta was okay, but Wyoming is the heart of the story.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 91 reviews