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The Ploughmen: A Novel
A young sheriff and a hardened killer form an uneasy and complicated bond in this mesmerizing first novel set on the plains of Montana.
Steeped in a lonesome Montana landscape as unyielding and raw as it is beautiful, Kim Zupan's The Ploughmen is a new classic in the literature of the American West.
At the center of this searing, fever dream of a novel are two men—a killer awaiting trial, and a troubled young deputy—sitting across from each other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: John Gload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of 77, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County sheriff’s department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload’s arrest. With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own. Their uneasy friendship takes a startling turn with a brazen act of violence that yokes together two haunted souls by the secrets they share, and by the rugged country that keeps them.
Steeped in a lonesome Montana landscape as unyielding and raw as it is beautiful, Kim Zupan's The Ploughmen is a new classic in the literature of the American West.
At the center of this searing, fever dream of a novel are two men—a killer awaiting trial, and a troubled young deputy—sitting across from each other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: John Gload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of 77, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County sheriff’s department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload’s arrest. With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own. Their uneasy friendship takes a startling turn with a brazen act of violence that yokes together two haunted souls by the secrets they share, and by the rugged country that keeps them.
272 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2014
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September 11, 2020
”The distance between reason to rage is short, a frontier as thin as parchment and as frail, restraining the monster. It was there in everyone, he thought. It was there in himself. A half second of simple blind fury and the hatchet falls down.”
Deputy Valentine Millimaki is burning the candle at both ends. He, with the help of his faithful dog, looks for missing people during the day, and at night he pulls down a shift at the Copper County jail where he chats with the stone cold killer John Gload. In between, he tries to sleep, but that proves as elusive as finding a dragon’s skull. His wife has moved to town and that is his fault. He is a shadow of a man when he is home and the gears in his mind are jammed with lost thoughts, half thoughts, and moments of murky clarity.
”Her words came in an exaggerated calm, as though to counteract his urgency. The room darkened suddenly, whether from a passing cloud or from some dimming behind his tortured eyes he could not tell. The exertion of mustering reason sufficient to the moment was enormous and his head swam.”
Hard to make a case for yourself when you're walking around like a zombie, directionless, exuding hopelessness out of your pores, and unsure if you believe in yourself anymore. The wife is pretty, a nurse, and there are plenty of doctors willing to give her the life she thinks she wants. Their hobbies are a little more mundane like golf, skiing, and fine wine. Millimaki’s hobby? Well, he takes pictures of dead people.
There is something elusive in the serenity of their bodies, a suspended violence, that maybe the camera lense can see that is just beyond the range of his own vision. He is on a quest that started with a tragedy in his own past. He is bonded to something bigger that he can’t quite grasp. ”He stopped in the road and held up his hands against the sky as if he might sift the stars in their billions through his fingers and make sense of the equivocal black like an ancient pyromancer. “
Millimaki wasn’t looking for a guru, certainly not a man like John Gload. They are connected through a tenuous, nostalgic memory of farming. At night fighting restlessness and fatigue Millimaki sits on a chair in front of the bars exchanging words with the disembodied glowing tip of a cigarette. ”Gload now sat half in light, half in dark, and he looked to have been sheared in two and set for display, head and shoulders of a taxidermied felon, a trophy displayed for tourists or schoolchildren in a diorama of prison life: table, chair, cot, Killer.”
Gload killed a woman at fourteen and left a string of buried bodies behind him over the long arc of his life. His hands and wrists are so big that cuffs barely fit him. Even at seventy-seven he is an impressive bull of a man. His soul is rusted tin mixed with rattling pieces of lugnuts and ragged bits of black lava. Remorse is as foreign to him as taking a walk on Mars. He is a living, breathing nightmare.
He don’t need a reason to kill you.
”He lay listening to miller moths battering themselves on the window screen behind his head----small souls seeking the freedom of the greater world.”
A man without a path is a man teetering over the abyss. Don’t look down Valentine. The creature inside is just looking for an excuse to unleash.
There is a poetic beauty to this book, filled with hard hitting, masterfully pared down sentences that convey the bleakness and loneliness of existing under a Big Sky. I’ve been to Montana many times on business and while walking around up there it always feels like I am treading in the firmament. My feet glide leaving only shadows of footprints. The curve of the Earth is pronounced and gave me the impression that at any moment I could tilt and tumble all the way back to Kansas. This novel catches some of that mysticism. It... is... Montana Noir and has a pedigree that stretches back to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, and Jim Thompson. It explores the simmering, boiling pot of violence that exists in most of us. It is about a man who embraces that violence. It is also about another man who continues to tamp that violence down keeping it hid behind a fragile veneer of righteousness.
***4.5 stars out of 5***
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Deputy Valentine Millimaki is burning the candle at both ends. He, with the help of his faithful dog, looks for missing people during the day, and at night he pulls down a shift at the Copper County jail where he chats with the stone cold killer John Gload. In between, he tries to sleep, but that proves as elusive as finding a dragon’s skull. His wife has moved to town and that is his fault. He is a shadow of a man when he is home and the gears in his mind are jammed with lost thoughts, half thoughts, and moments of murky clarity.
”Her words came in an exaggerated calm, as though to counteract his urgency. The room darkened suddenly, whether from a passing cloud or from some dimming behind his tortured eyes he could not tell. The exertion of mustering reason sufficient to the moment was enormous and his head swam.”
Hard to make a case for yourself when you're walking around like a zombie, directionless, exuding hopelessness out of your pores, and unsure if you believe in yourself anymore. The wife is pretty, a nurse, and there are plenty of doctors willing to give her the life she thinks she wants. Their hobbies are a little more mundane like golf, skiing, and fine wine. Millimaki’s hobby? Well, he takes pictures of dead people.
There is something elusive in the serenity of their bodies, a suspended violence, that maybe the camera lense can see that is just beyond the range of his own vision. He is on a quest that started with a tragedy in his own past. He is bonded to something bigger that he can’t quite grasp. ”He stopped in the road and held up his hands against the sky as if he might sift the stars in their billions through his fingers and make sense of the equivocal black like an ancient pyromancer. “
Millimaki wasn’t looking for a guru, certainly not a man like John Gload. They are connected through a tenuous, nostalgic memory of farming. At night fighting restlessness and fatigue Millimaki sits on a chair in front of the bars exchanging words with the disembodied glowing tip of a cigarette. ”Gload now sat half in light, half in dark, and he looked to have been sheared in two and set for display, head and shoulders of a taxidermied felon, a trophy displayed for tourists or schoolchildren in a diorama of prison life: table, chair, cot, Killer.”
Gload killed a woman at fourteen and left a string of buried bodies behind him over the long arc of his life. His hands and wrists are so big that cuffs barely fit him. Even at seventy-seven he is an impressive bull of a man. His soul is rusted tin mixed with rattling pieces of lugnuts and ragged bits of black lava. Remorse is as foreign to him as taking a walk on Mars. He is a living, breathing nightmare.
He don’t need a reason to kill you.
”He lay listening to miller moths battering themselves on the window screen behind his head----small souls seeking the freedom of the greater world.”
A man without a path is a man teetering over the abyss. Don’t look down Valentine. The creature inside is just looking for an excuse to unleash.
There is a poetic beauty to this book, filled with hard hitting, masterfully pared down sentences that convey the bleakness and loneliness of existing under a Big Sky. I’ve been to Montana many times on business and while walking around up there it always feels like I am treading in the firmament. My feet glide leaving only shadows of footprints. The curve of the Earth is pronounced and gave me the impression that at any moment I could tilt and tumble all the way back to Kansas. This novel catches some of that mysticism. It... is... Montana Noir and has a pedigree that stretches back to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, and Jim Thompson. It explores the simmering, boiling pot of violence that exists in most of us. It is about a man who embraces that violence. It is also about another man who continues to tamp that violence down keeping it hid behind a fragile veneer of righteousness.
***4.5 stars out of 5***
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
March 30, 2022
Darling - come alone to the shed.
goosebumps...
this is a book written in a dispassionate, matter-of-fact prose, but not so much that it comes across as detached. there is a wonderful filament of restrained emotion running through it that is pure poetry.
it's about the uneasy relationship between two men—a grizzled old criminal finally caught in his seventy-seventh year, and a young deputy with marital troubles and a tragic past, who meet in the prison where val millimaki, the deputy, has been given the overnight watch detail over the incarcerated gload. this takes place in the stark montana landscape, which is painstakingly and gloriously described on every page, with a particular emphasis on birds. so many birds. so much detail. but that's the kind of thing i love in these books—the landscape is as much a character as the people, and is just as hard and unforgiving as gload himself.
their relationship builds in a slow burn. gload is an incredibly clever man—having (mostly) avoided incarceration these long years by being an astute judge of character who manipulates people as needed. but he sees something in val—a shared love of nature and the land—and he develops an almost paternal affection for him. in some ways, their relationship reminded me of the dynamic between nick nolte and james coburn in the film-version of Affliction. (which i have also read, but their acting in their shared scenes is burned into my brain and is some of the most fun i have had watching two incredibly angry men push against each other growling like bears.)
val never becomes what nolte becomes, but there is the same kind of fuse lit between the men, as their lives and stories bounce off each other, and the book has similar themes of anger and violence and family baggage.
it's just a story of how things happen. how criminals make mistakes, how marriages fall apart, how age takes its toll while the seasons pass and the land changes impassively, and it is chock-full of fantastic scenes where gload passes along what he has learned to the younger man in their shared insomniac moments.
or
val is susceptible to gload's brand of father-friendship, emotionally vulnerable because of his insomnia, a wife who wants more than he can provide, and having been burnt out working a string of unrelated missing-persons cases; sent out with his dog to follow leads, and finding only corpses, time after time. his life is a series of blurred events, being carried forward by an exhausted momentum.
but val is essentially a compassionate man, and it's an unlikely and complicated friendship that develops despite the obstacles of gload's inherent hatred of cops and the responsibilities of val's job.
and, after gload's confession that he could have killed val at any time during their acquaintance:
which is totally Hannibal-reasoning
with a little bit of True Detective thrown in, replacing all that time is a flat circle with ex nihilo nihil fit.
it's overall a bleak tale, but with some rusted hope holding it all together.
the revelation of a life unlived and the purpose and freedom that rage can provide when polite restraint loosens its grip.
gload isn't a robin hood figure; no honorable thief, but he does what he does, and he has a code.
and, my, how he gets to the heart of those damn birds, gulls especially:
it's a striking, taut novel, filled with heartbreaking moments (the story about gload's father—aaargh) as well as the bloodshed. this is perfect for cormac mccarthy fans, or anyone who likes well-written, quietly profound stories in the grit-lit vein with equal parts violence and beauty.
love.
come to my blog!
goosebumps...
this is a book written in a dispassionate, matter-of-fact prose, but not so much that it comes across as detached. there is a wonderful filament of restrained emotion running through it that is pure poetry.
it's about the uneasy relationship between two men—a grizzled old criminal finally caught in his seventy-seventh year, and a young deputy with marital troubles and a tragic past, who meet in the prison where val millimaki, the deputy, has been given the overnight watch detail over the incarcerated gload. this takes place in the stark montana landscape, which is painstakingly and gloriously described on every page, with a particular emphasis on birds. so many birds. so much detail. but that's the kind of thing i love in these books—the landscape is as much a character as the people, and is just as hard and unforgiving as gload himself.
The wind shook the trees and their branches gnashed and shuddered and the wheat-pale needlegrass down every row lay on the ground. He stood at the prescribed spot looking through the gnarled trunks beyond which the sun burned slowly down. He moved forward a few paces and looked and he moved back, trying to see it as a stranger might. He squinted his eyes and through the ruddled apertures the cured orchard grass and the dark slender tree boles quaking against the sky were an impressionist's blur of blue, ocher, dun. The grass bowed and hissed in the wind and waiting he heard the dull pong of the harrow tines, hung in a tree like a rude mobile or wind chime, and then he went back.
their relationship builds in a slow burn. gload is an incredibly clever man—having (mostly) avoided incarceration these long years by being an astute judge of character who manipulates people as needed. but he sees something in val—a shared love of nature and the land—and he develops an almost paternal affection for him. in some ways, their relationship reminded me of the dynamic between nick nolte and james coburn in the film-version of Affliction. (which i have also read, but their acting in their shared scenes is burned into my brain and is some of the most fun i have had watching two incredibly angry men push against each other growling like bears.)
val never becomes what nolte becomes, but there is the same kind of fuse lit between the men, as their lives and stories bounce off each other, and the book has similar themes of anger and violence and family baggage.
it's just a story of how things happen. how criminals make mistakes, how marriages fall apart, how age takes its toll while the seasons pass and the land changes impassively, and it is chock-full of fantastic scenes where gload passes along what he has learned to the younger man in their shared insomniac moments.
"I've seen it a hundred times. Who you marry just goddamn turns out to be some other person after a while. Grows up into somebody else. Not better or worse. Just different."
or
"One thing I always did, Val, was to live my life. It wasn't a particularly interesting life but it was on my terms. Now in here I'm just living it out...Now it's just waiting. It's only a life technically because you're breathing in and out. Putting in the time until you clock out."
val is susceptible to gload's brand of father-friendship, emotionally vulnerable because of his insomnia, a wife who wants more than he can provide, and having been burnt out working a string of unrelated missing-persons cases; sent out with his dog to follow leads, and finding only corpses, time after time. his life is a series of blurred events, being carried forward by an exhausted momentum.
He lurched red-eyed through his days in a purgatory described by home and the jail, content in neither place. A bird laboring in a hurricane wind, moving nowhere yet unable to alight. How different from the animated skeletons of Gload's old folks' home was he?
but val is essentially a compassionate man, and it's an unlikely and complicated friendship that develops despite the obstacles of gload's inherent hatred of cops and the responsibilities of val's job.
"We're friends, John, inasmuch as you're in there for possibly killing somebody and I'm out here making sure you stay alive to be punished for it."
and, after gload's confession that he could have killed val at any time during their acquaintance:
"Friendship, then, because you didn't kill me."
His tired eyes stared into Millimaki's. "It does not, Deputy, get truer than that."
which is totally Hannibal-reasoning
with a little bit of True Detective thrown in, replacing all that time is a flat circle with ex nihilo nihil fit.
it's overall a bleak tale, but with some rusted hope holding it all together.
He'd never really thought about it, had merely gone where he'd been told and done what he'd been told and reveled in the earsplitting monotony and the reverie it provided.
the revelation of a life unlived and the purpose and freedom that rage can provide when polite restraint loosens its grip.
gload isn't a robin hood figure; no honorable thief, but he does what he does, and he has a code.
"There's times when you do that—look back and think, I should of done this or that or some other thing. Like with that kid. I don't have a lot of those times, a handful, but what I do know is that you can't never ever let them get under your skin. You did what you did at the time an at the time it was right. I regret almost nothing. This thing here lately. Some others. But I ain't been eat up by them, either."
and, my, how he gets to the heart of those damn birds, gulls especially:
And he told the deputy that the gulls began to arrive. They appeared first as minute white tufts against the green of the river trees and he turned and made a pass going away and then suddenly they were among the furrows behind the plow, as though like the soldiers of myth they sprang from the ground itself. He wondered how they found him and thought they may have followed the dust cloud or perhaps like wolves or hounds on a blood scent they could smell the new-turned earth. He threw the tractor into neutral and sat watching as the birds gorged themselves on tiny infant mice he had exposed from under small rocks and glistening worms as long as garter snakes and crickets and partridge nestlings and even above the pothering of the engine he could hear the gulls scream. They fought over every mouthful, the most successful of them gagging down pieces that would have choked a hyena and in the chaos of screeches there were times it seemed they would set upon one another until one gruesome bird remained, engorged and wallowing through the furrows unable even to raise his bloodied wings to fly.
it's a striking, taut novel, filled with heartbreaking moments (the story about gload's father—aaargh) as well as the bloodshed. this is perfect for cormac mccarthy fans, or anyone who likes well-written, quietly profound stories in the grit-lit vein with equal parts violence and beauty.
love.
He took up a handful of dirt and let it sift through his fingers. The wind came down from the northern benchlands and rattled the strange larval pods of the yuccas and brought the faint thin cries of gulls he could see afloat and stationary as kites against the morning sky. He tried to reconcile the avuncular old man tendering comfort and counsel from his dark cage with the creature who could placidly dismember a fellow human being. A lifetime ago while eating an apple… beside railroad tracks on a golden spring day, John Gload had observed in himself with a curious detachment the absence of passion. Perhaps he was somehow exempt from responsibility at all, could no more be blamed that could a child born without feet be blamed for his inability to run.
Millimaki sat in the dirt staring blankly at the grave, benumbed by sleeplessness. Gload seemed capable of kindness, but it may have been just a kind of vestigial feature, like the webbed and blunted limbs of thalidomide children - a half-developed grotesquery that made him more pitiable for the reminder of what it might have been like to be whole.
For the rest of us though, thought Millimaki, the distance from reason to rage is short, a frontier as thin as parchment and as frail, restraining the monster. It was there in everyone, he thought. It was there in himself. A half-second of simple blind fury and the hatchet falls down.
come to my blog!
February 1, 2020
Beautiful story. Beautifully written. Wew.... this really made an impact on me. Not a happy story, but somehow hopeful... And beautiful views of the Montana wild landscape. Beautiful. and recommended.
August 24, 2023
In Montana, John Gload is a 77 year old career thief and killer with a devoted wife. Young deputy sheriff Val Millimaki is a compassionate man with a difficult past and a dissatisfied wife. Part of Val's duties includes the often distressing job of searching for missing persons. Also, as the junior deputy, Val is given the night shift guarding Gload and the other prisoners. The insomniac Gload spends his nights forming an unusual relationship with Val.
For a book with a fair amount of death in it, every person in it felt very alive and real. A story that could have been just ugly, violent and mean in other hands had a peaceful, lyrical quality here. The writing was graceful and polished. Two brief quotes as an example: "The swaying lamplights made a strange parade of jittering light pools..." and
"...the distance from reason to rage is short, a frontier as thin as parchment and as frail, restraining the monster."
The author's treatment of the present day West reminded me of Cormac McCarthy. There are incredibly vivid descriptions of people and places and decisive dissections of situations, like an upper-crust cocktail party at a local mansion. The author also has a much better vocabulary than I do, and I kept a dictionary handy, but in spite of those minor disruptions to look up words, the language flowed beautifully.
I loved this book, the author's first, and I hope he writes more like this.
I received a free advance reader's edition of this book from the publisher.
For a book with a fair amount of death in it, every person in it felt very alive and real. A story that could have been just ugly, violent and mean in other hands had a peaceful, lyrical quality here. The writing was graceful and polished. Two brief quotes as an example: "The swaying lamplights made a strange parade of jittering light pools..." and
"...the distance from reason to rage is short, a frontier as thin as parchment and as frail, restraining the monster."
The author's treatment of the present day West reminded me of Cormac McCarthy. There are incredibly vivid descriptions of people and places and decisive dissections of situations, like an upper-crust cocktail party at a local mansion. The author also has a much better vocabulary than I do, and I kept a dictionary handy, but in spite of those minor disruptions to look up words, the language flowed beautifully.
I loved this book, the author's first, and I hope he writes more like this.
I received a free advance reader's edition of this book from the publisher.
April 11, 2019
This debut novel by Kim Zupan was absolutely stunning. It succeeds on so many levels. The development of the unlikely relationship between John Gload, a man responsible for numerous murders, and Valentine Millimaki, the lawman guarding him in jail is believable and revelatory. The beautiful and symbolic descriptions of the Montana landscape were particular and evocative. The language and prose style was sublime. Highly recommended and a great choice for book clubs.
Thank you to Henry Holt and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.
Thank you to Henry Holt and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.
June 14, 2024
What do a young police officer and a grizzled old killer have in common? They both were: raised on non-yielding farms, lost a parent in traumatic circumstances at a young age, suffer from insomnia, and are overly familiar with death. These two men--Val Millamaki and John Gload--can be viewed as opposite sides of the same coin. Millimaki has spent his life saving people lost in the brutal Montana landscape or, when he can't, recovering the bodies. Gload has spent his life killing people, hiding their bodies and selling their belongings.
And yet, these men form an uneasy bond that is the core of this novel. They are both experiencing isolation and living with ghosts. Imprisonment can be other than being locked in a jail cell; life circumstances can be just as confining and limiting.
"The world for these men was reduced to floor, ceiling, walls, and bars, and his own differed little — an unfixed cubicle of solitude that, like a carapace, went with him everywhere."
The development of the relationship between these two is skillfully written. Zupan shows us an almost tender side of Gload. He speaks earnestly, even affectionately to Millamaki, meting out advice as one would to a friend sitting around chatting, drink in hand. He talks about his love for Francie and their homestead. Millamaki, weary and with his defenses down, confides his troubles with insomnia and with his marriage. The intimacy of these conversations is unsettlingly belied by the cell bars separating the men as well as the interjection of Gload's seemingly unremorseful stories of some of his killings.
Zupan artfully weaves the Montana landscape into the story. He portrays both the harshness and the beauty, a perfect background on which to overlay this story.
The women in this story greatly impact these two characters, though are seen only peripherally in the narrative. These women are yearning for something and feel isolated in this rural, seemingly predominantly masculine world.
My only niggle is that descriptions are overwritten in places. The stark contrast to the dialogue and the depictions of the characters make this shortcoming stand out more than it might otherwise.
Kim Zupan's debut, and thus far only, novel The Ploughman while nominally a crime story, is an outstanding, complicated character study, an exploration of good and evil, both harrowing and convincing. I am left with a lingering feeling of disquiet, as I should be.
'Friendship, then, because you didn't kill me.'
'It does not, Deputy, get truer than that.'
Publication 2014
And yet, these men form an uneasy bond that is the core of this novel. They are both experiencing isolation and living with ghosts. Imprisonment can be other than being locked in a jail cell; life circumstances can be just as confining and limiting.
"The world for these men was reduced to floor, ceiling, walls, and bars, and his own differed little — an unfixed cubicle of solitude that, like a carapace, went with him everywhere."
The development of the relationship between these two is skillfully written. Zupan shows us an almost tender side of Gload. He speaks earnestly, even affectionately to Millamaki, meting out advice as one would to a friend sitting around chatting, drink in hand. He talks about his love for Francie and their homestead. Millamaki, weary and with his defenses down, confides his troubles with insomnia and with his marriage. The intimacy of these conversations is unsettlingly belied by the cell bars separating the men as well as the interjection of Gload's seemingly unremorseful stories of some of his killings.
Zupan artfully weaves the Montana landscape into the story. He portrays both the harshness and the beauty, a perfect background on which to overlay this story.
The women in this story greatly impact these two characters, though are seen only peripherally in the narrative. These women are yearning for something and feel isolated in this rural, seemingly predominantly masculine world.
My only niggle is that descriptions are overwritten in places. The stark contrast to the dialogue and the depictions of the characters make this shortcoming stand out more than it might otherwise.
Kim Zupan's debut, and thus far only, novel The Ploughman while nominally a crime story, is an outstanding, complicated character study, an exploration of good and evil, both harrowing and convincing. I am left with a lingering feeling of disquiet, as I should be.
'Friendship, then, because you didn't kill me.'
'It does not, Deputy, get truer than that.'
Publication 2014
September 26, 2014
“The Ploughmen is part inspired fever-dream, part adventure story, a lyric parable of not just good and evil but of the vast and beautiful and often lonely country in-between. Kim Zupan is a wonder.”
Rick Bass
A fever-dream is quite apt at describing a novel that feels like an unremitting nightmare, one that doesn't reveal its undercurrents immediately but drags on and on and sticks to the skin like an unbroken heatwave.
The strength (and weakness) of this stark and violent novel about the "friendship" that develops between a killer and a young sheriff in Montana is its verbosity. The language is so rich at times that it pulls you away from the immediacy and grimness of the setting. At other times, it is so astonishingly precise that it adds layers and layers of meaning to the ruggedness of a small town drowning in winter and to the quiet domestic despair that swallows a young husband.
A psychological tug of war that is sublimely rendered and felt.
An impressive first novel from a talent to be reckoned with.
Rick Bass
A fever-dream is quite apt at describing a novel that feels like an unremitting nightmare, one that doesn't reveal its undercurrents immediately but drags on and on and sticks to the skin like an unbroken heatwave.
The strength (and weakness) of this stark and violent novel about the "friendship" that develops between a killer and a young sheriff in Montana is its verbosity. The language is so rich at times that it pulls you away from the immediacy and grimness of the setting. At other times, it is so astonishingly precise that it adds layers and layers of meaning to the ruggedness of a small town drowning in winter and to the quiet domestic despair that swallows a young husband.
A psychological tug of war that is sublimely rendered and felt.
An impressive first novel from a talent to be reckoned with.
June 1, 2016
As a young boy on a Montana farm, Valentine Millimaki came across a note from his mother. Darling - Come alone to the shed. It does not occur to him that he is not the darling to whom she refers, and off he goes to find her swinging from a rafter. Years later Deputy Valentine Millimaki and his trusty dog, Tom, will be the go-to team sent to track the missing, to hunt down those who have wandered off; who have lost themselves in the wilderness. It is easy to see our deputy has placed himself forever on the path from the note to the shed. There are days of good, redeeming outcomes when the wayward turn up alive. Then there are those, frequent of late, in which the same stark and lonely scenes of death are all that's left to locate.
Re-enactment is the simple, monstrous truth of trauma. Choices made will unconsciously recreate the circumstance of the injury. It doesn't really matter what the modern-day literary vanguard attempts to collapse with regard to narrative structure - we are addicted to stories in large part because we are compelled as a species to seek resolution. And nowhere does this reality manifest more powerfully than in the wake of emotional catastrophe. We must fix this, at least to a degree that will provide us a world we're willing to live in.
Kim Zupan has crafted a protagonist whose compulsion cannot easily be upended. Enter John Gload, seventy-seven years on this earth and most of them spent killing. Millimaki draws the short straw; the graveyard shift of guarding the prisoner falls to him. Sleep, for the both of them, becomes as much of a memory as those childhood years spent plowing the fields of their fathers. The bond that develops will send each man spiraling out in unexpected directions.
This is a dark work, but a steady one. The prose gets a little dense in its description of scene and atmospherics - hand's a little heavy there. Still, if you're willing to grapple with the occasional tangle of a paragraph, Zupan definitely sees his harsh story through.
Re-enactment is the simple, monstrous truth of trauma. Choices made will unconsciously recreate the circumstance of the injury. It doesn't really matter what the modern-day literary vanguard attempts to collapse with regard to narrative structure - we are addicted to stories in large part because we are compelled as a species to seek resolution. And nowhere does this reality manifest more powerfully than in the wake of emotional catastrophe. We must fix this, at least to a degree that will provide us a world we're willing to live in.
Kim Zupan has crafted a protagonist whose compulsion cannot easily be upended. Enter John Gload, seventy-seven years on this earth and most of them spent killing. Millimaki draws the short straw; the graveyard shift of guarding the prisoner falls to him. Sleep, for the both of them, becomes as much of a memory as those childhood years spent plowing the fields of their fathers. The bond that develops will send each man spiraling out in unexpected directions.
This is a dark work, but a steady one. The prose gets a little dense in its description of scene and atmospherics - hand's a little heavy there. Still, if you're willing to grapple with the occasional tangle of a paragraph, Zupan definitely sees his harsh story through.
August 3, 2021
This authors one and only novel and it is a masterpiece. No words wasted. If you "enjoy" Cormac or Larry Watson this one should be added to your list.
Update: you know it’s a great book when you are jealous of your husband reading for the first time
Update: you know it’s a great book when you are jealous of your husband reading for the first time
October 10, 2014
“You know one of them sonsofbitches used a word I never heard before. I wrote it down here on my pad.”
This quote is more than just a bewildered prisoner, John Gload, on trial for his life, confused about a term employed in court. No, this is Zupan poking a little fun at his readers, acknowledging the weariness in his fingertip-fatigued digits worn to nubs while sifting through his thesaurus, ever alert for fifty-dollar words to throw about. Perse, aphotic, canzonet, integument, and a host of other like lovelies to confound. Mind you, this book is jammed with wonderful, descriptive lines, though he goes overboard sometimes, like a recent convert to the Church of English, determined to shine for his newfound faith. Perhaps he is one of those word lovers who studied his dictionary like the Bible. He certainly sent me scurrying repeatedly to ferret out a meaning. Perhaps I am just ignorant. I tell you though, I will never challenge this guy to a game of Scrabble.
If you think I didn’t like the book, however, you would be misled. I thought it a wonderful exploration of the interplay between a laconic incarcerated sociopath, feared by locals (even cops) who have long believed him responsible for horrible crimes, and a good-hearted deputy (who splits his time between searching for folk in the badlands with his dog---lately only finding the deceased---and serving third shift at the local jail) slowly falling apart under the pressure of work and a failing marriage.
I enjoyed most the unspooling of the story through conversations, as well as frequent dialogue between officer Valentine Millimaki and his boss, the Sheriff. I enjoyed the descriptions of Montana farmlands. In some ways it is a grittier, flowery, less-wisecracking view of western policing that I like in Craig Johnson’s books. In some ways, except for it is well outside the region, I might easily classify this as grits lit in the vein of Woodrell. Yes, some of the depravity and damage is hard to digest, and for me the crumbling marriage and nights in the jailhouse rang true to some of my experiences of life, but I encourage people to give it a try.
This quote is more than just a bewildered prisoner, John Gload, on trial for his life, confused about a term employed in court. No, this is Zupan poking a little fun at his readers, acknowledging the weariness in his fingertip-fatigued digits worn to nubs while sifting through his thesaurus, ever alert for fifty-dollar words to throw about. Perse, aphotic, canzonet, integument, and a host of other like lovelies to confound. Mind you, this book is jammed with wonderful, descriptive lines, though he goes overboard sometimes, like a recent convert to the Church of English, determined to shine for his newfound faith. Perhaps he is one of those word lovers who studied his dictionary like the Bible. He certainly sent me scurrying repeatedly to ferret out a meaning. Perhaps I am just ignorant. I tell you though, I will never challenge this guy to a game of Scrabble.
If you think I didn’t like the book, however, you would be misled. I thought it a wonderful exploration of the interplay between a laconic incarcerated sociopath, feared by locals (even cops) who have long believed him responsible for horrible crimes, and a good-hearted deputy (who splits his time between searching for folk in the badlands with his dog---lately only finding the deceased---and serving third shift at the local jail) slowly falling apart under the pressure of work and a failing marriage.
I enjoyed most the unspooling of the story through conversations, as well as frequent dialogue between officer Valentine Millimaki and his boss, the Sheriff. I enjoyed the descriptions of Montana farmlands. In some ways it is a grittier, flowery, less-wisecracking view of western policing that I like in Craig Johnson’s books. In some ways, except for it is well outside the region, I might easily classify this as grits lit in the vein of Woodrell. Yes, some of the depravity and damage is hard to digest, and for me the crumbling marriage and nights in the jailhouse rang true to some of my experiences of life, but I encourage people to give it a try.
December 19, 2015
It's crazy busy right now but I do plan to write a review of this very good book...(I hope).
February 11, 2020
This book automatically gets three stars for its beautiful, haunting language. The author’s personal experience of the bleak, stark beauty of Montana is enthralling. However, aside from that beautiful language and palpable setting, the story itself is rather lifeless. It reminded me of the first season of “True Detective” without the suspense and phenomenal acting. The killer is already incarcerated on page 1 and the plot meanders rather predictably from there. There’s darkness and depression and the futility of repetition culminating in an acceptable ending but overall just an average novel with some outstanding language.
May 21, 2022
3.5 stars
To quote a friend who read and loved this novel: “It’s a slow burn . . . “ That is an understatement, my friends.
“At the dark end of the day he held Gload’s elbow like an old companion as they crossed the frozen courthouse yard on icy sidewalks, the old man in his leg irons shuffling among the stark shadows of still-leafless elms as black as columns of anthracite in the pearl moonlight of early April.”
This is the story of the complex relationship that simmers and builds during the graveyard shift between an aging killer named John Gload and a young deputy sheriff named Valentine Millimaki in an unnamed prison in an unnamed town in the western US state of Montana. Both these men suffer relentless insomnia, and Zupan’s realistic descriptions of that affliction put me on edge - not to mention the trail of bodies in both men’s lives, and the eerie coincidental similarities in their childhoods. The prose was a bit overwritten for my taste and a couple scenes too theatrical for me, and at times the pace was painfully slow, but I loved the landscape and all the characters (except Glenda). This author needs to publish another book. He is a talented storyteller who knows his setting and convinced me that Montana is a state I sorely need to visit. I’ll close with another quote to illustrate the emotional tension in this novel:
“. . . the distance from reason to rage is short, a frontier as thin as parchment and as frail, restraining the monster. It was there in everyone, he thought. It was there in himself. A half second of simple blind fury and the hatchet falls down.”
~ Valentine Mallimaki
To quote a friend who read and loved this novel: “It’s a slow burn . . . “ That is an understatement, my friends.
“At the dark end of the day he held Gload’s elbow like an old companion as they crossed the frozen courthouse yard on icy sidewalks, the old man in his leg irons shuffling among the stark shadows of still-leafless elms as black as columns of anthracite in the pearl moonlight of early April.”
This is the story of the complex relationship that simmers and builds during the graveyard shift between an aging killer named John Gload and a young deputy sheriff named Valentine Millimaki in an unnamed prison in an unnamed town in the western US state of Montana. Both these men suffer relentless insomnia, and Zupan’s realistic descriptions of that affliction put me on edge - not to mention the trail of bodies in both men’s lives, and the eerie coincidental similarities in their childhoods. The prose was a bit overwritten for my taste and a couple scenes too theatrical for me, and at times the pace was painfully slow, but I loved the landscape and all the characters (except Glenda). This author needs to publish another book. He is a talented storyteller who knows his setting and convinced me that Montana is a state I sorely need to visit. I’ll close with another quote to illustrate the emotional tension in this novel:
“. . . the distance from reason to rage is short, a frontier as thin as parchment and as frail, restraining the monster. It was there in everyone, he thought. It was there in himself. A half second of simple blind fury and the hatchet falls down.”
~ Valentine Mallimaki
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 28, 2021
Cormac McCarthy meets Silence of the Lambs. I only read this at this time because of a woman's century challenge in my classics group. I decided to do it with modern books because I have so many owned and unread ones now that I read so many classics. Newer works rarely seem to live up to the quality of the prose in the classics. The Ploughmen is one of those rare ones that does live up.
As I started reading this I thought it sounded too masculine to be a woman and sure enough, Kim is a man. I hate when that happens! But I am thankful because who knows when I would have gotten to this otherwise. It doesn't have an overall high rating or a lot of buzz.
Kim Zupan's writing is rich, lyrical, and evocative. I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy when reading this but though there are brutal parts, they aren't as long or as vivid as a Cormac McCarthy violent scene.
In this story, we have two men, 77-year-old John Gloade who is a serial killer, and Valentine Millimaki, a deputy who tracks missing persons and works the night shift at the county jail where the insomniac Gloade lands after he is caught. Gloade hates law enforcement but he takes a liking to Millimaki. The Sheriff encourages Millimaki to talk to Gloade in hopes of him leading to more bodies. The two end up having a strange relationship that Gloade calls friendship, but Millimaki says that it's hard to consider someone a friend who would kill you if they got the opportunity.
Besides Cormac McCarthy in general, this reminded me a lot of Silence of the Lambs even though they are very different, but the aspect of the killer taking a liking to a detective was similar. Millimaki isn't the standard type of serial killer, he kills mostly for money, or personal gain (no witnesses, etc..), but he has had a long string of murders that started when he was only 16 years old. Besides a different type of serial killer, this isn't a thriller like Silence of the Lambs. It's a character study of these two men and how their similar circumstances led to very different paths but also allowed each to understand the other.
Zupan's lyrical prose, believable characters and dialogue, and evocative descriptions of the Northern Montana landscape grabbed me and held me to the end. I didn't care as much about what happened as how he would describe what happened. When I looked him up and found out he wasn't a woman, I also found that this is his only book and it was published in 2014. I certainly hope this isn't his last.
As I started reading this I thought it sounded too masculine to be a woman and sure enough, Kim is a man. I hate when that happens! But I am thankful because who knows when I would have gotten to this otherwise. It doesn't have an overall high rating or a lot of buzz.
Kim Zupan's writing is rich, lyrical, and evocative. I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy when reading this but though there are brutal parts, they aren't as long or as vivid as a Cormac McCarthy violent scene.
In this story, we have two men, 77-year-old John Gloade who is a serial killer, and Valentine Millimaki, a deputy who tracks missing persons and works the night shift at the county jail where the insomniac Gloade lands after he is caught. Gloade hates law enforcement but he takes a liking to Millimaki. The Sheriff encourages Millimaki to talk to Gloade in hopes of him leading to more bodies. The two end up having a strange relationship that Gloade calls friendship, but Millimaki says that it's hard to consider someone a friend who would kill you if they got the opportunity.
Besides Cormac McCarthy in general, this reminded me a lot of Silence of the Lambs even though they are very different, but the aspect of the killer taking a liking to a detective was similar. Millimaki isn't the standard type of serial killer, he kills mostly for money, or personal gain (no witnesses, etc..), but he has had a long string of murders that started when he was only 16 years old. Besides a different type of serial killer, this isn't a thriller like Silence of the Lambs. It's a character study of these two men and how their similar circumstances led to very different paths but also allowed each to understand the other.
Zupan's lyrical prose, believable characters and dialogue, and evocative descriptions of the Northern Montana landscape grabbed me and held me to the end. I didn't care as much about what happened as how he would describe what happened. When I looked him up and found out he wasn't a woman, I also found that this is his only book and it was published in 2014. I certainly hope this isn't his last.
May 20, 2015
A-Z Challenge with Karly and Jess
Z = Kim Zupan
4 stars
You were good to me Valentine. I hope you have a good life from here on in.
Your FRIEND,
John X. Gload
P.S. I was yours, even if you wasn’t mine.
Set against the bleak Montana plains, The Ploughmen is the story of an unlikely friendship between two men, one a prisoner, the other a guard.
Valentine Millimaki, a young deputy with a troubled past, is recently assigned night watchman duty and is going through hard times. Unaccustomed to the strange hours, he suffers from extreme insomnia and ultimately marital issues. But as he and his wife’s relationship slowly deteriorates, his relationship with the infamous John Gload progresses further than he would have ever imagined.
Gload seemed capable of kindness, but it may have been just a kind of vestigial feature, like the webbed and blunted limbs of thalidomide children - a half-developed grotesquery that made him more pitiable for the reminder of what it might have been like to be whole.
Have you ever liked someone you knew was a bad person? That’s how you feel about John Gload. From the age of 14 when he committed his first murder, he knew that he was without a soul, numb to feelings and emotions of the world around him.
A lifetime ago while eating an apple (an apple, Val thought, like me that day, eating that apple) beside railroad tracks on a golden spring day, John Gload had observed in himself with a curious detachment the absence of passion. Perhaps he was somehow exempt from responsibility at all, could no more be blamed than a child born without feet could be blamed for his inability to run.
From then on he made a career or never working a hard day in his life. Instead, he fooled poor schmucks, deprived them of their possessions, and chopped them up and hid their body parts all over the land. Gload is brutal, cunning, and clever. It takes sixty-four years for Gload to be captured, and when he is, he sits there waiting for them, unresisting, for he knows his time is up.
The subsequent relationship that builds between these two is measured. Bonding over farming and being abandoned at a young age, they slowly start confiding in each other, trusting in unexpected ways. Gload passes down advice in an almost fatherly way.
"One thing I always did, Val, was to live my life. It wasn't a particularly interesting life but it was on my terms. Now in here I'm just living it out…Now it's just waiting. It's only a life technically because you're breathing in and out. Putting in the time until you clock out."
And although the story is slow at times and the author has a tendency to use an overabundance of adjectives, it’s the relationship of these two that gets to you. The Ploughmen isn’t so much a story of redemption, but of truth.
"For the rest of us though, thought Millimaki, the distance from reason to rage is short, a frontier as thin as parchment and as frail, restraining the monster. It was there in everyone, he thought. It was there in himself. A half-second of simple blind fury and the hatchet falls down.”
ex nihilo nihil fit out of nothing comes nothing
January 21, 2021
Remarkable writing.
I'm hesitant to declare this haunting novel and the writing to be found therein akin to one of Cormac McCarthy's novels.
Set in Montana in Copper County, there's a deputy sheriff, Valentine Millimaki who with his German Shepherd, "Tom", works Search & Rescue. Sometimes the people who wander off and get lost down coulees, ravines are safely located. Sometimes they freeze to death in the snow or wind up dying from snake bite.
When he's not working Search & Rescue, Deputy Millimaki has to sit up nights tending the county jail. It's there that he meets a remorseless small time criminal and long-time murderer named John Gload.
I was completely transfixed by this tale.
It drifts from the present slowly and then here's a chapter about events that occurred ten or twenty years earlier. Suddenly the reader is then in the middle of an exhausting search for an elderly man suffering from Alzheimer's who just up and walked away from the campsite of his family. He thought he could hear his dead wife's voice calling to him.
The minor crimes of John Gload are passed off as after dinner conversation along with the related details of the murders he committed.
It's an amazing work by a unique author.
I'm hesitant to declare this haunting novel and the writing to be found therein akin to one of Cormac McCarthy's novels.
Set in Montana in Copper County, there's a deputy sheriff, Valentine Millimaki who with his German Shepherd, "Tom", works Search & Rescue. Sometimes the people who wander off and get lost down coulees, ravines are safely located. Sometimes they freeze to death in the snow or wind up dying from snake bite.
When he's not working Search & Rescue, Deputy Millimaki has to sit up nights tending the county jail. It's there that he meets a remorseless small time criminal and long-time murderer named John Gload.
I was completely transfixed by this tale.
It drifts from the present slowly and then here's a chapter about events that occurred ten or twenty years earlier. Suddenly the reader is then in the middle of an exhausting search for an elderly man suffering from Alzheimer's who just up and walked away from the campsite of his family. He thought he could hear his dead wife's voice calling to him.
The minor crimes of John Gload are passed off as after dinner conversation along with the related details of the murders he committed.
It's an amazing work by a unique author.
March 19, 2023
This debut novel has several strong points, not least of which is the unusual relationship developed between the deputy, Valentine Millimaki, and the killer, John Gload. At first glance, a reader would expect them to be opposites, but that's only surface detail. Culturally and emotionally, they are the same--farmers from hardscrabble families, orphans, and loners. Whilst the deputy and the killer deviate in the emotional importance they attach to what they do and what happens to them, they are plagued by the same things--insomnia and nightmares. In terms of characterization, the novel is brilliant in its juxtaposition.
Montana is the third strong character that defines these two men whilst depriving them of other relationships. The land is in their blood--they love it, they hate it, and it defeats them. Those readers with an affinity or experience of the high plains will appreciate Zupan's real understanding of the oppressive open sky, the endless horizon, the desperate, if not terrifying isolation, the wind that drives a person insane. It reminds why I never looked back after I left West Texas.
Unfortunately, Zupan nearly ruins his novel with overwrought sentences and inappropriate vocabulary. He lards sentences with too much information; this tendency calls attention to itself and, sometimes, makes comprehension difficult. Furthermore, the latinate vocabulary--"plenitude of the refulgent sun" and "the sky transubstantiated"--call such attention to itself that the reader is thrown completely out the story. It is as if Zupan is so afraid of writing a cliche that he creates a thesaurus exercise instead. He uses transubstantiate as a verb twice; yes, it plays to the Catholic imagery he weaves into the story, but it's a verb with such a restricted meaning--only one thing transubstantiates, that only in the canon of the Mass--that it gives the appearance of being clever for clever's sake, the very problem with most MFA novels. The style is deliberately difficult, such that an inattentive or impatient reader will readily throw this book aside. Zupan would've done better to heed Elmore Leonard and ditch anything writerly.
received from the publisher
Montana is the third strong character that defines these two men whilst depriving them of other relationships. The land is in their blood--they love it, they hate it, and it defeats them. Those readers with an affinity or experience of the high plains will appreciate Zupan's real understanding of the oppressive open sky, the endless horizon, the desperate, if not terrifying isolation, the wind that drives a person insane. It reminds why I never looked back after I left West Texas.
Unfortunately, Zupan nearly ruins his novel with overwrought sentences and inappropriate vocabulary. He lards sentences with too much information; this tendency calls attention to itself and, sometimes, makes comprehension difficult. Furthermore, the latinate vocabulary--"plenitude of the refulgent sun" and "the sky transubstantiated"--call such attention to itself that the reader is thrown completely out the story. It is as if Zupan is so afraid of writing a cliche that he creates a thesaurus exercise instead. He uses transubstantiate as a verb twice; yes, it plays to the Catholic imagery he weaves into the story, but it's a verb with such a restricted meaning--only one thing transubstantiates, that only in the canon of the Mass--that it gives the appearance of being clever for clever's sake, the very problem with most MFA novels. The style is deliberately difficult, such that an inattentive or impatient reader will readily throw this book aside. Zupan would've done better to heed Elmore Leonard and ditch anything writerly.
received from the publisher
July 19, 2014
I received The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan from Goodreads. The novel is a very rare find of poetic beauty and quiet violence. My expectations were blown away as I became completely immersed in the story of two men who couldn't be more different yet couldn't be more like each other, and the bond they forged with one another. Their pasts were uncannily similar but the choices they made literally define what we call good and evil. There is a stillness to the revelations here that cannot be described; the impact is profound. You might encounter a novel of this caliber a handful of times in a lifetime. I can't recommend it strongly enough.
August 4, 2021
4.49 stars (and those who love me and know my predilections are going to be disappointed it's not a 5). I LIKED this book...........but I'll not be carrying it around in my head for months on end (and that's a compliment in a few ways).
Let's start here though- this is not a Cormac novel. I'd suspect the author is a Cormac lover; as such I actually appreciate him being his own deal rather than an imitator-----but those who love McCarthy are likely to get this title thrown at them from someone who says, "you're gonna love this one- it's like a Cormac novel"---------don't shoot them, they are trying to be helpful, but get that outta your head. But if you like Larry Watson, and Rick Bass, and William Gay, etc. you're going to like this one too.
Avoiding the storyline somewhat- ravenous characters abound on both sides of the good and evil playing field. You'll be drawn to some of their qualities and repulsed by others.....you know........kinda like a family reunion. You'll find greatly drafted symbolism that most casual readers might overlook- I especially liked the use of apples (shriveled no less), birds of all kinds for all manner of reasons, and the Ploughman Lunch thrown in so flippantly I almost missed it (nice touch). It's everywhere, and I would catch more on a second read which draws me.
It's well paced, it's true in its sense of place, it uses just the right touch of magical realism to keep things interesting. There were a few overused terms. For example, the use of the word coulee was great at first read and took me the right place, but then was overdone- same for Hungarian Partridges- but BOTH of those are my own problems and not anything you'd likely be caught off guard by.
It is a REALLY good book.........read it, you'll like it. Here's to HOPING this guy has a set of short stories built up somewhere that will someday be released; those would garner a 5 star rating. I would almost gamble on it. I'd also wager that Kim Zupan could give two shits what kind of star rating any of us give his work. That's why I liked him-------you know, cause he's like Cormac and all.
Let's start here though- this is not a Cormac novel. I'd suspect the author is a Cormac lover; as such I actually appreciate him being his own deal rather than an imitator-----but those who love McCarthy are likely to get this title thrown at them from someone who says, "you're gonna love this one- it's like a Cormac novel"---------don't shoot them, they are trying to be helpful, but get that outta your head. But if you like Larry Watson, and Rick Bass, and William Gay, etc. you're going to like this one too.
Avoiding the storyline somewhat- ravenous characters abound on both sides of the good and evil playing field. You'll be drawn to some of their qualities and repulsed by others.....you know........kinda like a family reunion. You'll find greatly drafted symbolism that most casual readers might overlook- I especially liked the use of apples (shriveled no less), birds of all kinds for all manner of reasons, and the Ploughman Lunch thrown in so flippantly I almost missed it (nice touch). It's everywhere, and I would catch more on a second read which draws me.
It's well paced, it's true in its sense of place, it uses just the right touch of magical realism to keep things interesting. There were a few overused terms. For example, the use of the word coulee was great at first read and took me the right place, but then was overdone- same for Hungarian Partridges- but BOTH of those are my own problems and not anything you'd likely be caught off guard by.
It is a REALLY good book.........read it, you'll like it. Here's to HOPING this guy has a set of short stories built up somewhere that will someday be released; those would garner a 5 star rating. I would almost gamble on it. I'd also wager that Kim Zupan could give two shits what kind of star rating any of us give his work. That's why I liked him-------you know, cause he's like Cormac and all.
May 14, 2023
As if because he was cursed to sleeplessness, John Gload had become expert in the nuances of sleep. Sporadically, in stretches of months, sometimes years, he’d had time to decipher the night’s minute tickings, the folds and creases of it while caged men near him slept, twitching or writhing in unconsciousness while their breath rifled in and out through constricted throats and nostrils that had been malformed in fights and those still capable expiating their sins in the confessionals of dreamland. For some the commodious limits of the cell became in nightmare the close configuration of their own coffins and they battled their rough blankets as though they were the winding clothes they’d worn to the grave and there were others who relived in prurient languor trysts with women gagged with their own hosiery or mute children or other weaker men waylaid in the showers of a recurring incarceration and John Gload read in these moans and sighs, in the wet and strangled sounds in their mouths, the sins of flesh duplicated in their slumbering. Dead people paraded through Gload’s dreams, too, but he was untroubled by them and though they were his victims and wore rubious scars, they seemed no more strange to him than the random beings populating any man’s dreams.
“They’re all asleep, Val,” the old man said.
Millimaki paused, his shadow leaning to merge with the dark of Gload’s cell.
“Why not pull up your chair, Deptee?”
“They’re all asleep, Val,” the old man said.
Millimaki paused, his shadow leaning to merge with the dark of Gload’s cell.
“Why not pull up your chair, Deptee?”
August 5, 2016
Also read my review here: http://bookbum.weebly.com/book-review...
Darling - come alone to the shed.
I’ve found it so hard to write a review for this book because it was such a moving, descriptive novel. It was sort of one of those reads that I loved for no particular reason, it was just a gorgeous book at the right time.
This book was by no means an “easy read”, it has some very dark and upsetting subjects running throughout it but it was one of those reads that I fell into so easily and smoothly every time I picked it back up. It was a complete pleasure to read. I gave it only 4 stars because various things in my day-to-day life made my reading of this very choppy, so I think I’d like to read this again in the future in a more relaxed time and maybe this would even get a 5 star rating.
I think this book and its characters are definitely going to stay with me for a while. Valentine was a precious soul, and in his own way, John was too.
Thanks to my quarterly challenge for forcing me into reading this because I don’t think I would have picked it up for years and years otherwise!
Darling - come alone to the shed.
I’ve found it so hard to write a review for this book because it was such a moving, descriptive novel. It was sort of one of those reads that I loved for no particular reason, it was just a gorgeous book at the right time.
This book was by no means an “easy read”, it has some very dark and upsetting subjects running throughout it but it was one of those reads that I fell into so easily and smoothly every time I picked it back up. It was a complete pleasure to read. I gave it only 4 stars because various things in my day-to-day life made my reading of this very choppy, so I think I’d like to read this again in the future in a more relaxed time and maybe this would even get a 5 star rating.
I think this book and its characters are definitely going to stay with me for a while. Valentine was a precious soul, and in his own way, John was too.
Thanks to my quarterly challenge for forcing me into reading this because I don’t think I would have picked it up for years and years otherwise!
January 2, 2019
5
Kim Zupan has written a beautifully dark and disturbing book that reminds me of the old literature of the 50s and 60s. This is very tough to read and is nice to see that authors still exist, who can turn a one shot setting into twenty pages of amazing writing. The Road by Cormac McCarthy has been sitting on my shelf for years and because of this book, I'll be reading that novel shortly. I have no idea how this book came to be on my list, but I can strongly suggest it was a Goodread review or recommendation.
The poetic writing and deliberate pacing holds your attention on the characters. Kim Zupan has written another of my top 2018 books and I'm a little annoyed I hadn't come across this book earlier. This book is like an indie film, some will love it, while others will hate it. The characters are dark and even our central character isn't the dashing hero everybody is wanting. He is a deeply flawed character and that is what makes his interactions with the evil John Gload all the more compelling. This relationship is impossible to gauge and while you may have ideas of where the storyline might lead to, it's near impossible to guess the ending.
Why the 5?
Give credit where credit is due. Kim Zupan is a talent to behold and I cannot wait for the next book. This was released in 2014 so another could hit the shelves shortly, fingers crossed the author reads these reviews. The harshness of the environment is on every page and you can feel an author at his highest creative heights here, the beautiful writing is on every page. This is why I love literature and not the quick thrill airport novels, this has depth and takes longer to read, even though it has shorter pages. This was a nice surprise and reading with Hold the Dark, delivered a one-two punch for the 2018 year finale.
Kim Zupan has written a beautifully dark and disturbing book that reminds me of the old literature of the 50s and 60s. This is very tough to read and is nice to see that authors still exist, who can turn a one shot setting into twenty pages of amazing writing. The Road by Cormac McCarthy has been sitting on my shelf for years and because of this book, I'll be reading that novel shortly. I have no idea how this book came to be on my list, but I can strongly suggest it was a Goodread review or recommendation.
The poetic writing and deliberate pacing holds your attention on the characters. Kim Zupan has written another of my top 2018 books and I'm a little annoyed I hadn't come across this book earlier. This book is like an indie film, some will love it, while others will hate it. The characters are dark and even our central character isn't the dashing hero everybody is wanting. He is a deeply flawed character and that is what makes his interactions with the evil John Gload all the more compelling. This relationship is impossible to gauge and while you may have ideas of where the storyline might lead to, it's near impossible to guess the ending.
Why the 5?
Give credit where credit is due. Kim Zupan is a talent to behold and I cannot wait for the next book. This was released in 2014 so another could hit the shelves shortly, fingers crossed the author reads these reviews. The harshness of the environment is on every page and you can feel an author at his highest creative heights here, the beautiful writing is on every page. This is why I love literature and not the quick thrill airport novels, this has depth and takes longer to read, even though it has shorter pages. This was a nice surprise and reading with Hold the Dark, delivered a one-two punch for the 2018 year finale.
May 14, 2015
"One thing I always did, Val, was to live my life. It wasn’t a particularly interesting life but it was on my terms. Now in here I’m just living it out. [...] Now it’s just waiting. It’s only a life technically because you’re breathing in and out. Putting in the time until you clock out."
The Ploughmen is a meandering tale that switches point of view between two men: John Gload, a 77 year old that has spent his life as a contract killer but is inevitably caught and his jailer, Valentine Millimaki who is a quiet and introspective man with a painful past and difficult personal issues he’s currently dealing with between him and his wife. These two men strike up a surprisingly quick bond between one another during Millimaki’s graveyard shifts at the jail, reminiscing on their lives, connecting in twilight over their shared bouts of insomnia.
'Then he corrected himself, said no, that’s not quite exactly right, it wasn’t tricking himself but tricking the insomnia, which he imagined as a palpable thing, a kind of shade or haunt that bent over him in his repose, passing rattling hand bones in the air above him to ward off the visitation of sweet slumber.'
There is violence but little action, mostly reflection, between the pages of this small yet potent novel. The Ploughmen is a somber story about life and hardships and learning to simply survive them. It’s written in such a way without a clear sequence of events, which I attributed to Millimaki’s continued sleepless days and nights, but doesn’t leave the reader feeling groggy but instead with that dreamy weightless feel.
'Perhaps she’d stood gazing uncomprehendingly at the emerging stars, in their milky light superimposing the enormous order wheeling overhead onto the map that seemed to hold her life in its obtuse loops and lines.'
Even if the story is not one you would typically read, the skillful writing style that Zupan possesses makes it completely worth while just for the experience alone. Stark yet completely stunning, the incredibly descriptive passages tell a story all on their own. The Ploughmen is an incredibly impressive debut and I can only hope that it’s not the last we’ve seen of this talented author.
I received this book free from Library Thing in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
The Ploughmen is a meandering tale that switches point of view between two men: John Gload, a 77 year old that has spent his life as a contract killer but is inevitably caught and his jailer, Valentine Millimaki who is a quiet and introspective man with a painful past and difficult personal issues he’s currently dealing with between him and his wife. These two men strike up a surprisingly quick bond between one another during Millimaki’s graveyard shifts at the jail, reminiscing on their lives, connecting in twilight over their shared bouts of insomnia.
'Then he corrected himself, said no, that’s not quite exactly right, it wasn’t tricking himself but tricking the insomnia, which he imagined as a palpable thing, a kind of shade or haunt that bent over him in his repose, passing rattling hand bones in the air above him to ward off the visitation of sweet slumber.'
There is violence but little action, mostly reflection, between the pages of this small yet potent novel. The Ploughmen is a somber story about life and hardships and learning to simply survive them. It’s written in such a way without a clear sequence of events, which I attributed to Millimaki’s continued sleepless days and nights, but doesn’t leave the reader feeling groggy but instead with that dreamy weightless feel.
'Perhaps she’d stood gazing uncomprehendingly at the emerging stars, in their milky light superimposing the enormous order wheeling overhead onto the map that seemed to hold her life in its obtuse loops and lines.'
Even if the story is not one you would typically read, the skillful writing style that Zupan possesses makes it completely worth while just for the experience alone. Stark yet completely stunning, the incredibly descriptive passages tell a story all on their own. The Ploughmen is an incredibly impressive debut and I can only hope that it’s not the last we’ve seen of this talented author.
I received this book free from Library Thing in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
September 14, 2014
This is an evocative and oddly moving novel about the relationship between an elderly killer and a young deputy sheriff. John Gload is in his seventies and awaiting trial. He has spent virtually his whole life as a criminal, seemingly untroubled by his life of violence and the lives he has taken. As he ages, Gload decides that he needs a helper, but young ‘Sid the Kid’ proves to be his undoing. When young Valentine Millimaki is sent to guard him at night, he strikes up an odd relationship with the killer. Both men come from farming backgrounds and, seemingly, Gload seems to want to share his memories with Val. Val is asked to pass on any information given to him by Gload about his past crimes, which causes ill feeling between him and other guards, who feel he is being favoured by those in charge.
However, Valentine feels anything but favoured. As well as his duties as a guard, he spends much of his time with his dog Tom, attempting to track missing people and he is having a bad spell of finding bodies rather than rescuing anyone. Meanwhile, his wife, Glenda, becomes distant and wants ‘space’ to think and both Val and Gload share an inability to sleep. Why does Gload seem to understand what Val is going through? Do they share more than he would care to admit and what does Gload want from him? As Val struggles with work and marital difficulties, their intimate talks result in an unexpected twist which will bind the two men together. Although this novel has very little action, it is strangely gripping and intense, with two memorable main characters.
However, Valentine feels anything but favoured. As well as his duties as a guard, he spends much of his time with his dog Tom, attempting to track missing people and he is having a bad spell of finding bodies rather than rescuing anyone. Meanwhile, his wife, Glenda, becomes distant and wants ‘space’ to think and both Val and Gload share an inability to sleep. Why does Gload seem to understand what Val is going through? Do they share more than he would care to admit and what does Gload want from him? As Val struggles with work and marital difficulties, their intimate talks result in an unexpected twist which will bind the two men together. Although this novel has very little action, it is strangely gripping and intense, with two memorable main characters.
December 4, 2014
First I must credit the narrator, Jim Meskimen, as I am convinced he enhanced my enjoyment of this audiobook by at least one star. Perfect casting. His voice was captivating and echoed the melancholy of the two main characters.
I can't help but compare this to another grim story that was recently published, also set in Montana and written by a debut author, Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson. I think if you enjoyed that book as I did, you will enjoy this one, although it is even darker. This story isn't complex. In fact, it is one we've heard before, but Zupan's writing style is mesmerizing and beautiful. I do have a small criticism. At times I felt that the author was trying too hard. I am not averse to grabbing a dictionary, especially because it now fits in the palm of my hand. In fact, I love a book that challenges my own limited vocabulary and provides the opportunity to expand it, but I found this more disruptive to the story than fitting. And there were times the words were absolutely jarring...e.g. inchoate green grass. What? Petty grievances aside, the story is beautifully rendered.
I can't help but compare this to another grim story that was recently published, also set in Montana and written by a debut author, Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson. I think if you enjoyed that book as I did, you will enjoy this one, although it is even darker. This story isn't complex. In fact, it is one we've heard before, but Zupan's writing style is mesmerizing and beautiful. I do have a small criticism. At times I felt that the author was trying too hard. I am not averse to grabbing a dictionary, especially because it now fits in the palm of my hand. In fact, I love a book that challenges my own limited vocabulary and provides the opportunity to expand it, but I found this more disruptive to the story than fitting. And there were times the words were absolutely jarring...e.g. inchoate green grass. What? Petty grievances aside, the story is beautifully rendered.
October 22, 2019
Really enjoyed this tale of a depressed police guard who spends his days tracing missing people with his dog and finding dead bodies every time and his nights with a very old crazed killer who gradually describes everything that he has done in his life. A quick read but full of great descriptions of the surroundings in Montana and great dialogue between the two main characters. Be warned that it is extremely gruesome and violent though. In the end, I somehow ended up liking the old man serial killer as well.
A very powerful book - will definitely look out for whatever this author does next.
A very powerful book - will definitely look out for whatever this author does next.
August 13, 2014
Review to follow.
March 18, 2020
This book had promise, I liked most of the dialogue. But, this author clearly got a thesaurus for Christmas and was determined to wear it out while working on this overwritten book.
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