Aucun homme ni dieu

by William Giraldi, Mathilde Bach (Translator)

« Le premier enfant disparut alors qu’il tirait sa luge sur les hauteurs du village. Sans un bruit – nul cri, d’homme ou de loup, pour témoin. »
Quand Russell Core arrive dans le village de Keelut, la lettre de Medora Slone soigneusement pliée dans la poche de sa veste, il se sent épié. Dans la cabane des Slone, il écoute l’histoire de Medora : les loups descendus des collines, la disparition de son fils unique, la rage et l’impuissance. Aux premières lueurs de l’aube, Core s’enfonce dans la toundra glacée à la poursuite de la meute.
Aucun homme ni dieu nous entraîne aux confins de l’Alaska, dans cette immensité blanche où chaque corps qui tombe, chaque cri, semble absorbé par la splendeur silencieuse de la nature. Un roman envoûtant, poétique, inoubliable.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Thriller, Mystery, Crime, Mystery Thriller, Contemporary

229 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 8, 2014

About the author

William Giraldi is author of the novels Busy Monsters, Hold the Dark (now a Netflix film), and About Face, the memoir The Hero's Body, and a collection of literary criticism, American Audacity (all published by W.W. Norton). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and is Master Lecturer in the Writing Program at Boston University.

Reviews

[Wendy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hoo, boy. I did not like this book at all, and I had many reasons. Yo ready for this? Then throw on some Tag Team and let's do this thing.

I'm not going to list each reason out individually like a bullet list this time, I'm just going to go with it, and hopefully it will make enough sense to be readable. A brief summary: a woman named Medora Slone supposedly loses her son, the third in the village to be taken by wolves, so she writes to Russell Core, a wolf expert who shot one once and spent the rest of his life feeling guilty over it, and invites him to come and try to find and kill the wolf that did it. He comes, but he's not really sure why, since he doesn't want to kill any wolves, and he's also vaguely suicidal and no one cares, including the long-suffering reader. Only, her son wasn't taken by wolves like the other two kids, she killed him and wrapped him in cellophane and put him in the root cellar (finding this out was when I began to be disappointed in this book, and I'll explain why in a moment). She takes off while Core is out looking for but not killing the wolves, who really did take the other two kids because there's a famine and they're starving and stuff. Core comes back, finds the dead kid's body, and alerts everyone and the cops come and don't really do anything useful other than wonder why Core is there. Then Vernon Slone, Medora's husband, who's been away at war and murdering people (which we find out mostly in flashbacks, showing us that he's probably got PTSD, except not, because he totally murdered somebody before he ever went away to war, in a completely unnecessarily violent way, and he probably should've called the cops instead of straight-up murdering the dude, but whatever. That's a pattern in this book--needless massacre), comes back and starts killing everybody (except Core) and looking for his wife/twin sister. Yeah. At the end, he finds her, shoots but doesn't kill Core, has sex with her right in front of him, and they disappear into the wild to live happily-ish ever after.

That summary probably put you off quite a bit, didn't it? Well, that's because it's my (honest) summary, and not the summary that came with the book. See, I was under the impression that I was reading about wolves eating people because of a famine, and people having to come to terms with their own involvement in nature's problems, their grief and desire for revenge against animals who are simply obeying instinct and hunger, and you know, other things of that nature that are introspective and actually happen and make sense. Silly me. Don't know what I could've been thinking of. You know what's way better than making sense and having a point? Gratuitous incest!!!

Yeah, see, Vernon and Medora are actually twin brother and sister as well as husband and wife, and that's supposed to be the amazing, horrifying twist that makes it all make sense, except that it wasn't a twist because I figured it out pretty quickly--way before the climax--and it didn't make it make sense. Nothing could make this stupid story make sense. Sure, I get it, postpartum depression and the instinct against incest made Medora kill their son. Except, if she is instinctively that opposed to it, why did she go along with marrying her brother in the first place? And why, in the end, when she thinks about killing him and has the knife in her hand and everything, did she not go ahead and do it, freeing her from him?

And where in the world were the parents?? Yeah, we're told that their father shot himself around the time she was pregnant with Bailey (their son), and that he tried to cure Vernon's 'unnatural ways' with wolf oil when he was five or six, but seriously? Why didn't he just grab one of the kids and take off for parts unknown? If they were separated (since that was apparently the only way to keep them from taking naked walks and rolling around naked together even at that young age), then they can't marry each other. Boom! Problem solved. And why does the mother (and most of the rest of the village, I might add) seem to approve of this disgusting union? It just doesn't make any sense.

Particularly since Vernon seems to have been born messed up. I might have excused him snapping, upon learning that his son had been killed by his wife/sister, if it had just been PTSD, but the dropped hints that he was considered 'unnatural' even as a little boy, the story about him killing a wolf just for fun, his brutal murder of the drifter guy before he ever went to war, these things seem to point to his being born a sociopath. That makes his actions stupid and nonsensical--he should have been calculating, and he wasn't. He wasn't a grief-stricken, traumatized soldier who was lashing out at the world, yet he wasn't really a sociopath, either. He doesn't seem to have any real motives, and he never becomes anything more than a mystery to the reader. I suppose this was meant to make him seem like a force of nature (like a wolf, get it, har har har, except wolves still have motives even if people don't always understand them), but it didn't, it just made him seem like a one-dimensional character who was only there to make Plot happen.

Seriously, let's just look at his initial murder of the two cops--it just comes out of nowhere. We're standing around talking, and suddenly there's just casual description of how he shot one in the face and the other in the forehead, and then shot them again for good measure, just like we're describing someone getting groceries. What? Okay, so later, a character claims he killed them to keep the cops from finding his wife first--but then Vernon thinks to himself that they'd never find her anyway because the two of them know paths that none of the town cops would know. So...that makes their deaths unnecessary, right? If you want to avoid police attention and take care of something yourself, vigilante-style, generally the best way to do that is to not murder any cops. If he'd just gone home, they probably would have looked for her in Canada and not paid him any more attention, and he would have been free to go murd--I mean, have sex with her, since once he finds her, you're expecting retribution and murder and stuff, since he's cold-bloodedly killed a bunch of different people at this point just for, I don't know, talking to her, but instead he just grabs her by the throat, slams her against the floor, and then starts making out with her and eventually has sex with her. Again--what?

But like I said, there's plenty of one-dimensional not-making-sense to go around. Cheeon, when the cops come to talk to him about the fact that the two cops were murdered with a gun matching the type of one he has registered and Vernon has disappeared, decides to bitch about how there's a famine and no jobs, and apparently this is somehow the police's fault, and how the wolves took his daughter and he doesn't think the cops cared, I guess just because they didn't go murder every wolf in the area? Anyway, then he goes upstairs and starts taking them all out with a machine gun, with lots and lots of gory description, until Marium, the main cop character, sneaks into the house and kills him. I didn't know Cheeon, and one conversation didn't give me insight into why all this happened, so other than taking up space, none of that really had a point.

Not even the good guys are likable or relatable at all. Marium is your generic cop character with a baby on the way (so you can guess what happens to him), and Core is...nearly suicidally depressed? It seems to be his only character trait. I'd tell you not to get attached to anyone, since they're all fair game (except Core, who is the Reader Avatar), but there's no fear of that.

It doesn't help the characters at all that the dialogue is all stilted and unnatural. This is not how people talk, not at all. Even in crappy cop shows they talk more naturally than this. I might have been able to handle it if it had been a quirk of one character to talk like this, but it isn't--they all repeat themselves, they're all vague and speak in riddles, they all repeat what someone else just said to them, and they all offer up stories that seem to come out of nowhere and are only barely related to what's going on, much to the mystification of the reader and the other character, neither of whom asked for this story or understand why it's being told at this particular moment.

That leads me to another point--this book couldn't seem to decide, at first, if it was going to go the scientific route or the mystical one, but it pretty quickly dove nose-first into the mystical one, and I just couldn't get behind that. I don't believe people's fates are written in ice--I don't believe that vagrant guys can just show up and tell you that your child is cursed and must not be born, without ever having met you or anyone you know--I don't believe in the Sasquatch or wolf demons or curses. I don't believe in 'otherness.' I believe Alaska is freaking Alaska and makes perfect sense. I also don't believe people are born so 'unnatural' as part of a 'curse' that they decide to marry their sisters and gruesomely murder other people with little provocation.

See, reality is allowed to not make sense like that. When a man in real life walks into a school or a theater or a mall and just starts shooting everyone, it's tragic and it generally doesn't make sense to anyone and it leaves everyone bewildered and reeling and afraid and horribly, horribly sad. When it happens in fiction, the reader knows that the author is the one causing this to happen--not fate, not an unstable person who wouldn't or couldn't find help--no, it's the author doing this, and that's why it has to make sense. Fiction isn't allowed to be as strange as reality, largely because making things happen for no reason just smacks of lazy writing and makes the reader angry. None of the events of this book touched me at all, other than to greatly irritate me, because there was no attempt made at logic or characterization. Things...simply happened, and the characters were simply there to make them happen. They had no life of their own.

The book was also gross in all the wrong ways. Since I was expecting a book about wolves eating people, I was expecting the gory stuff. I was not expecting the gross sex stuff, which happened entirely too often for my liking. When Core shows up, Medora comes to him naked in the night and puts his hand on her privates for...reasons? When Vernon is searching for Medora, he finds her, ahem, fluids on the sheets at the motel she stayed in, and he masturbates, which also doesn't make sense because she killed his son. That...really, really shouldn't make you want to masturbate. There's almost loving description of some guy picking his nose and eating it, and for some reason, the author felt it necessary to have Core shave his entire body, and dedicates several sentences in each scene afterward to drawing your attention to the fact that he's all shaved under his clothes. There was also a lot of awkward sniffing of clothing and stuff. Seriously, authors of the world, WOLVES ARE NOT PEOPLE, PEOPLE ARE NOT WOLVES. I realize the symbolism is irresistible to some, but get over it. Yes, wolves are cool, and we humans can be a lot more animalistic than we realize, but we're not actually wolves. Can it, authors. Find some new symbolism.

The worst part of it all is that you force your way through, you drag yourself through the mire of this book, and it was all for naught. 'Unnatural ways,' 'a curse,' 'wolf demons,' and 'otherness' are all the explanation you're ever going to get, and apparently you're supposed to be...I don't know what reaction the author was going for, honestly. Really, this book actually had potential--if you removed the incest subplot and the attempts at mysticism and the many, many, many unnecessary, unhelpful and irrelevant mentions of wolves, and made it instead a book about a woman overcome with loneliness and postpartum depression in the far reaches of Alaska, and then added in her husband snapping after facing a war that left him traumatized and coming home to find out that his wife murdered his son while he was gone, then it might have been interesting. I'd read that book, tragic though it would be.

I already mentioned that the dialogue wasn't very good--well, sad to say, the prose wasn't very good, either. Half the time it was delivered in sentence fragments that were apparently supposed to make you feel as though what was being said was Very Important, and the other half it was so purple I could have gagged. The author had two or three turns of phrase that I mildly enjoyed, but the rest of the time...it could've been taken down a few notches.

Even if you put aside all of its other flaws, if you assume I'm being picky or whatever, it's just a thoroughly unpleasant book filled with thoroughly unpleasant people that wound up to nothing. I found it a needlessly grim, miserable book (everything in it seemed to scream dark and edgy!!), and it was pointless to boot. I think it goes without saying that I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

[Kyle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I honestly don't care enough to fully explain my low rating. All you need to know is that I thought I was going to read a novel about a man sent to track and hunt the wolves that were taking children from a remote Alaskan village...

...but this was not that book.

There is a huge shift in plot, where Hold the Dark essentially becomes an uninteresting and generic crime novel. I was eager to read about the harsh Alaskan terrain; the mythos and mystery surrounding those far-reaching and desolate places... and I got a bit of that, sure- The people on the periphery: the unknowable and forgotten ones, surviving in the cold, unrelenting wilderness. But it wasn't enough to distract from the cluster-f*ck of bad.

Give me bleak. Give me Cormac McCarthy vibes. Give me mystery. But give me, too, characters to root for, a story that makes sense, and violence that's not senseless.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to like this book more than I did.

I want to have the same reading experience that Denis Lehane, Daniel Woodrell, Tim O'Brien and Thomas McGuane purport to have in their blurbs.

Wolves have begun taking children from an Alaskan village. Not in some fairy tale kind of way, but the food supply is scare and a lone toddling around child makes a nice little snack for a hungry wolf kind of way.

One of the children taken causes the mother of the boy to write to a nature writer and wolf expert to see if he can come and find the remains of her boy and kill the wolf. He arrives in the village, makes some startling discoveries and everything goes to shit.

While all this is happening the wife's husband is catching a non-fatal bullet in his shoulder in Iraq and is now on his way home with a medical discharge. While in a hospital awaiting his trip home he finds out that his boy is dead and his wife is missing.

Without giving away too much of the plot or the twists in the story, the husband returns home and he reacts like any man does when confronted by the death of a child and a missing wife. He starts killing people.

That's all I'll say about the plot, most of what I've given is said in the copy, so I don't think I'm ruining anything for readers.

The problem I had with the book was it felt inauthentic. It felt like someone from the city writing about an alien type rural people and place that he wasn't familiar with. And this can be fine, but too many of the 'ultra-rural other' were brought out with the feeling that Deliverance was used as the source material for how the less civilized of us act. Even the few scenes from the husband's time in Iraq felt like it was watered down from what could be read in any one of the great books written by a Marine who did some tours there. In other words, it kind of felt like what I think I would write if I were setting out to write about serving in Iraq or what a village on the far cusp of hospitable land in Alaska would be like.

Maybe one can figure out there own reasons for the nature writers appearance into the story, he is a focal point to the novel, so it's obvious he should be there for this story to happen, but it's less clear why in the logic of the other characters in the book he would have been summoned. A cop asks him about three quarters through the book, why are you still here? And the answer is probably because the nature writer is the reader. The witness needed to tell the story. He puts into motion through his discoveries the action of the book, but there is no reason why he should have been there in the first place. The action couldn't have happened without him (sort of), much like if you think of a book as a universe of its own with characters living out the script they have been given them they don't really enact their own dramas without a reader observing them (think of all the unlived lives just sitting unread on the bookshelves, each copy of each book a story waiting to come to life, or something).

The nature writer is there as a foil for how different life in the Alaskan wilderness is to the rest of the world. It's colder and darker, and if you don't know that many of the conversations that involve the nature writer will remind you of those facts.

I also had some trouble with the husband's character. The rampage he goes on and the flashbacks of him as kind of a heart-of-gold sociopath kind of mesh, but uncomfortably. It works in making him a slightly more nuanced character than just a guy out seeking indiscriminate revenge but it more feels like we are supposed to feel not so bad about following this character around because he's not all that bad, so the extreme violence that follows is kind of ok. But too much of the violence that follows in his wake is of the sort of, ok that was kind of cool but why?

Maybe that's the radical otherness of these people, they a standing just on the other side of civilization's accepted notions of good and evil and their ways can be witnessed but only understood in some perplexing way that doesn't fully make sense.

As a fun and violent read this is good. But in the wake of so many good gritty Western/Appalachian/Ultra-Rural/Redneck/Whatever you want to call it books that have been coming out lately it just doesn't stand up all that well. The writing is good, but the author seems a little out of his depth.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was just something about the darkness and atmosphere of this book that had a real pull for me. The coldness, the baroness and the strange village of Keelut, Alaska, a town without roads that is not easy to find.

There are secrets in this village and when three children are taken by wolves, one of the mothers, Medora calls for help from a wolves expert, a man named Core. When he comes to the village he finds all is not what it seems.

This is a novel that will not appeal to everyone, for one thing it is very violent. The violence does, however, fit with the darkness of the story. I never understood where this novel was going, but I found the strangeness compelling. What I thought would happen did not, and what did happen was mindboggling. There is still one question that I did not feel was adequately answered but maybe I should have been able to figure it out on my own.

ARC from publisher.

[Raven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three children have been snatched by wolves in the small Alaskan community of Keelut, including the six-year old son of Medora and Vernon Sloane. Wolf expert Russell is called upon to investigate and track the pack responsible, but soon begins to see into the dark psyche of Medora. When her husband Vernon returns from a desert war to discover the boy dead and Medora missing, he begins his own pursuit of his errant wife, across the frozen wastes and with much violence along the way. As Core attempts to intercede in the inevitable collision of husband and wife, he unwittingly unveils a dark secret that exists between them…

During the recent cold snap here in the UK, it seemed entirely appropriate to be reading a novel set in the frozen wastes of the Alaskan tundra. This is a cold, grim and unrelentingly miserable read, but for the most part, I rather enjoyed this grief- filled and violent tale.

Drawing heavily on the naturalistic writing tradition of American literature, Giraldi has produced not only a compelling crime novel, but also one that encompasses a careful study of the human condition. Indeed, at one point in the book there is a direct reference to how to understand the very essence of human nature and behaviour, we should look to the woods and not to the books, and how “the annals of human wisdom fall silent when faced with the feral in us.” There is a primeval simplicity at the heart of the book, as we bear witness to the violence meted out by the Sloanes. With the interweaving of Vernon’s active service abroad, and his pursuit of his wife (taking no prisoners along the way), the central credo of base human emotion drawing on our wilder animalistic instincts comes to the fore throughout. It’s a fascinating psychological study, and although the vast majority of the characters are inherently dislikeable, there is much to be learned and enjoyed about the more base emotions that the characters exhibit in this brutal tale.

Giraldi’s depiction of the wildness of his characters, sits perfectly alongside his portrayal of this unique and bleak location, where everybody’s existence is dictated to by the exacting weather conditions and landscape of this inhospitable place. The community itself exists on the folklore and superstitions of generations past that continue to influence the character’s lives and calling on the spirits of their ancestors to direct their own paths and to deflect evil. There is a sense of other-worldliness throughout the book as we discover the ancient traditions of this society, and set against the vibrant depiction and understanding of the natural world that surrounds them, the folkloric aspect of the book is entirely satisfying.

I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who was held spellbound by Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, and books of that ilk. I was also much heartened to see an endorsement by Tim O’Brien, a master of the Vietnam fiction genre, as the passages in Hold The Dark dealing solely with Vernon’s army service are powerfully wrought indeed. As I said it’s not a life-affirming or particularly hopeful read, and the sudden bursts of brutal violence are not for all, but I liked it. Very much.

[Dystopian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Finishing this book was an exercise in masochism.

Giraldi wrote this book as if he had a thesaurus on his lap and burning desire to use every adjective and adverb he could find.

His editor should be fired for letting him misuse/overuse "scape." He used "scape" when he meant "landscape" and he also used it in combinations such as "moonscape" when looking out on a moonlit night. By the end I was begging out loud for him to kill that darling.

SPOILERS---------------------------------------------




This book made little sense. It begins with three children being snatched by wolves in a remote Alaskan village. The third mother calls a biologist who has made his life a study of wolves. She begs him to come to Alaska and track and kill the wolf and retrieve her son's bones. Why she would choose him I do not know. Why she thought that anyone could find wolf-ravaged bones in twenty feet of fresh snow is confusing as well. But all these vague motives pale when the biologist gets to the village and finds the boy's body in the basement of the mother's house where she has hidden him after strangling him to death.

Why did she kill her child? Apparently because an old "hag" had told her, while she was pregnant, that the boy would be "bad." So after the birth she waits seven years and kills the boy, hides the body, and begs someone to come to the village to find his remains.

It gets even more ridiculous from there on out. The husband comes home from the war, and he and his best friend kill just about everyone they meet including many police officers, for little or no reason.

At the end of the book you find out the husband and wife are twin siblings, and that they've hidden out at a hot springs near the village and that the wife is pregnant again. The End.

Between the florid prose and the lack of coherent plot this book is one hot....well, cold....mess.

[reading is my hustle · Rating 2 out of 5]

update:
just tried to watch this movie on netflix & stopped 15 minutes in & thought to look up the book it was based on. it's unusual for me to forget reading a book & given the content i can't believe i've forgotten having read this. wut? i wish i had used the notes feature.

So much of this did not work but the parts that did were decent enough. The whole story starts on an off note. But this character moves the story along and becomes the historian of events. Still, I was bothered enough that it took me out of the narrative constantly & I kept flipping to the back cover to study the picture of the author. Who was the author? Was he a native Alaskan? From the other 48? I worried it was the latter and if so (William Giraldi) was other and writing about Alaska having only lived in a big city. This bothered me more. I know. I annoyed me, too.

But thank goodness for fellow reviewers! Greg does a swell job reviewing and explaining my complicated relationship with this novel. I encourage you to read his review.

[Katerina Charisi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ο-μι-τζι.

Τέτοια παπάρα δεν έχω διαβάσει ούτε από έλληνα συγγραφέα. Η ταινία; το ίδιο και χειρότερη. Δε θα γράψω τα γιατί, υπάρχουν λεπτομερέστατα ριβιού για όποιον περίεργο που καλύπτουν όλες τις απορίες. Η ουσία πάντως είναι πάντα ίδια: Η άχνη στα σκατά δεν τα κάνει κουραμπιέδες.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a deeply creepy mystery, where it's obvious from the beginning that there are dark unspoken secrets hidden in this remote Alaskan village. 

[Wiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

The notion of myth makes an early appearance in Hold The Dark, the second novel from author William Giraldi. Keelut, the remote Alaskan territory which provides the backdrop for most of the novel’s events, is a fictional one; a name presumably chosen by Giraldi in homage to the folkloric traditions of the area in which the Keelut is a mysterious and terrifying cryptid; a hairless, black dog-like creature that stalks man in the hours of darkness.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, wolves play a major role in the story’s events, including the opening incident – a spate of unusual child disappearances in the village which have been attributed to the seldom-seen herds of canis lupus that stalk the mountains surrounding Keelut. The supposed killings are mourned in private, but when a third child is taken, his mother, Medora Slone, breaches the protocol of the village and reaches out to a stranger, Russell Core, a writer and wolf-expert, to investigate the disappearances with a view to understanding and then killing the animals responsible. Her motives are apparently transparent – her husband Vernon is at war in the desert, and powerless against her fate in his absence, Medora’s sense of vengeance serves her desire to bring justice to both her son’s and her husband’s memory. Whilst normally disinclined to answer such a call to arms, the passive and world-weary Core is nevertheless touched by Medora’s letter and further motivated by a need to make penance for his own past shortcomings. Carrying the burden of a an estranged wife and daughter, Core is still haunted by a past error of judgement which necessitates he make amends in kind. Met with mute suspicion if not hostility on his arrival, Core does not get far into his investigations with the enigmatic and evasive Medora before he uncovers a far more insidious and terrible explanation for her son’s disappearance. Predictably, when Vernon returns early from the desert inured to violence by his experiences in bloody combat, his grief at discovering his son’s murder finds outlet in a visceral and relentless trail of vengeance that will sweep Core into its path and change him forever.
Emotionally taut and compellingly written, this is a novel that not only has its seeds in the great American traditions of Cormac McCarthy and James Dickey but further back to the epic Greek tragedies of the Oresteia. In both Vernon Sloan and his childhood soul-mate - the silent but deadly Cheeon - Giraldi has created characters comparable to McCarthy’s Anton Chirgurh in their unnerving and seemingly emotionless brutality. Conversely, the character of Medora Sloan is a masterclass in understatement. Cursed by a sense of “otherness” Medora is trapped within the confines and expectations of a paganistic patriarchal society where, reminiscent of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, she is driven to near madness by her own particularly female sin of sexuality. Is it a tragedy or inevitability of circumstance that causes Medora Sloan and Russell Core to converge so spectacularly at this particular point in their lives?
Though hardly an advertisement for gender equality the portrayal of both Medora Sloan and the Keelut women in general are perfectly pitched for the closed-off world of the novel, reduced as they are to totems of sex, motherhood or witchcraft; roles which effectively seal their fates in one gruesome way or another. Indeed, none of the novel's major characters experiences the traditional arc associated with commercial fiction although Core comes closest in his trajectory from passive, weary observer to reluctant embracer of life. Even this however, is a stretch, both for Core himself and for the reader, and as a result the narrative makes for a mostly bleak though always motivated reading experience.
A clever sort of reverse anthropomorphism runs throughout the novel. Here, rather than the elevation of animals to human status, the humans are reduced to their most feral and primal parts. At several points this conceit is made explicit: man is worse, Core tells us, for the wolves kill only in desperate times of necessity whereas humans have the arrogance to presume killing an entitlement irrespective of sanction or morality.
Giraldi’s narrative style is both inviting and distancing in equal measure, which I can only assume was fully intended as part of the novel’s design. Whilst both Vernon and Core’s stories are told in third person, Core’s is the more intimate of the two, allowing us to participate in both his thoughts and his redemption, whereas that of Vernon Sloan is told from a more limited perspective, regulated by a visual and sensual aspect which allows us to vicariously experience his tale without ever being in danger of becoming complicit in his psychology. Giraldi’s language throughout is compellingly readable. There is frequent poetry in his carefully chosen and perfectly pitched metaphors which are as capable of conjuring a conflict driven war-zone as they are a landscape of silence without ever being self-conscious or precious. As a consequence, the novel is both as short and as long as it needs to be, yet all the more improved by the economy and discipline the author demonstrates over his craft. Giraldi's dialogue too, has a hypnotic quality, from the infinite loop of Core’s repeated questions, to the terrifyingly insistent calm of Cheeon as he squares up against the detective Marium. Even the minor characters of the novel are beautifully observed, with an assiduous attention to form over function that makes them wholly credible as opposed to mere plot devices or mouthpieces for a particular point of view. People, including Core, are often captured in moments of shock, awe, or silence at their experiences, lending the narrative a nightmarish, dreamlike quality that contributes to the sense of terror and claustrophobia. Keelut is a law unto itself, invisible and impenetrable to the rest of the world until the moment of its implosion after which it appears to simply and efficiently absorb the mess and close ranks, covering its own tracks in the same way the fresh snowfall covers what has been before it.
As with McCarthy, Giraldi uses his settings as both a stage upon which to set his drama and as a character in its own right. The extremes of climate and landscape visited throughout the novel echo the poles of moral compass we are asked to witness and consider; from the heat and dust of reckless passion to the bleakness and unforgiving brutality of the cold.
Hold the Dark will not appeal to everyone. It is a dark, brittle and muscular read whose eventual climax and resolution, whilst wholly motivated, will disappoint those looking for the catharsis of conventional “justice”. As a highly original exploration of human desires, misguided superstitions and terrible impulses, however, it can do no wrong in my book.

[Dennis Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once in a blue moon I read a book so good, I find myself struggling to describe how fantastic it is and why. "Hold the Dark" by William Giraldi is an example of that. I've been taking my time with it, savoring the poetry of every sentence, and allowing myself to sink into the dark abyss the book opened before me. A violent tale of a small and secluded village in Alaska. I'm still struggling to find a way of describing the plot without ruining the book. I might do a proper review once the experience has settled within me. Suffice to say that this is one of those rare gems of modern literature I wouldn't hesitate to call it a work of art. It has the makings of a classic, and I would say that Giraldi's literary heritage lies with Melville, Conrad and London.

I've taken the liberty to include some quotes from the book that hopefully will show why I find it such a great read. Consider this the digital equivalent of me pushing a book into your hands and saying: Read this! Don't ask any questions. Just read it.

"The wolves came down from the hills and took the children of Keelut."

"The tea warmed his limbs, a lone orange coal or glowing hive pulsing from the center of him"

"Like grief, cold is an absence that takes up space. Winter wants the soul and bores into the body to get it."

"Above them a passel of ravens erupted from the keep of trees like black memories freed, their wings in wild applause."

"... he was beginning to fear that man belongs neither in civilization nor nature - because we are aberrations between two states of being."

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The dead don't haunt the living. The living haunt themselves."

In the tradition of David Vann, Daniel Woodrell, Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy, William Giraldi writes of evil things set in terrible, beautiful landscapes where secrets are easy to hide and humanity rots in cellars and forests or is beset upon by wild animals that feast on the carrion of our nightmares.

Hold the Dark is a sort of Revenant for the modern age, a tale of beasts and hunting, snow and corrupt hearts. It did not surprise me to learn this 2014 novel was quickly optioned and the film is currently in production. The setting is a vibrant, wretched character in its own right, the pacing breathless, plot idiosyncratic, characters iconic.

The premise starts, takes a radical shift to the left, and never entirely returns, but it is this: In a remote village in the Alaskan wilds, wolves are stealing children. Medora Slone, a mother of one of the stolen, calls upon world-renowned wolf expert Russell Core to find her child's killer. What Core, who at sixty is hollowed out by his own tragedies, finds waiting for him in Keelut sets off a search through Alaskan backcountry that is painted in a nightmare of black and white and blood all over. Oddly, Core's character shifts into the shadows; he is replaced on center stage by Vernon Slone, Medora's husband, returned from a war in a distant desert to find his wife missing and his only child dead.

There are so many trigger warnings to this novel that you really should just stay away if violence troubles you as a reader. Shades of Deliverance, of Blood Meridian—you get the picture. Sadly, what you won't get by avoiding this novel is Giraldi's taut, shimmering prose. His language is hypnotic and mythic and worth the price of a cruel and dreadful story. Good luck.

[Julia Sarene · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a really disturbing book.
It was not at all what I expected - and not in a good way.
The blurb let me think it was about a pack of wolves taking children - and a wolf expert who looks into things. I did expect it to be grim and bloody, but not the way it was.

First of, the wolves had hardly a big part - they felt more like the backdrop in a theater.
Then the characters were just so unbelievable and unlikable. All of them. Instead of a "sciency" thriller about wolves I got to read about disturning, sick people. I get that humans are the bigger monsters than wolves. I get that there is "a wolf" in us all. But that was just over the top - and felt like gore for the sake of it - and it didn't look like a "Layman" book....

Synopsis and why I thought it just so bad:
The woman who murdered her child is the sister of her husband, who comes home from war and goes on a killing spree looking for her. He wants to find her first - and in order to do that he kills whomever gets in the way -including two police officers. (That would not bring way more police down onto their track surely...)

His friend kills more than 10 people with a machine gun, untill he himself is killed - without any understandable reason, besides describing the gore in detail.

When the husband finally finds his sister - he has sex with the woman who murdered his son, and flees with her into the tundra, where they live in an old hunting iglo their father had built years back, where they live "happily ever after" with her being pregnant again (sure, this time it will work out better - away from civilization...), and the whole village helps them, by not speaking with the police, letting the body of an old lady who fell victim to the husband dissappear and bringing them tools to build a new, bigger iglo.

BTW - the wolves are almost starved - that's why they took those two children who vanished first - but the husband of course finds enough food to feed them through the last month(s) of winter, with the supplies left in the iglo years before, and a pack or two left by their mother and what he can hunt....

I have no idea what the point of the book should be, or how I should feel now - really I just think "Okaaayyyyy...?" and that's that.

One star for Alaska and the descriptions of the cold, the snow and how to live there.
Otherwise the only good thing I could find was that is really short....

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Giraldi easily holds place alongside great authors such as Daniel Woodrell, Megan Abbott and James Ellroy in terms of being able to recreate the dark nature of man and convey it with compelling conviction. Through a blanket of fine white snow, this cold heared yet warm blooded rural-like noir breathes life into the deathly disassociated community of Keelut.

The closed cabin compound is breached by an academic in search of answers; Core, riddled by internal torment, having lost a child to wolves is called upon by Medora, a local women with a husband at war, to find the body of her son, another presumed victim of the wolves - those eager hunters in ever need of a full belly.

There is a real sense of remoteness in HOLD THE DARK that envelopes the reader in its atmosphere. The cold, dark woods that surround the isolated community and the distinct 'us against them' mentality of the Keelut residents is as scary as it is sacred. Not even murder among their own is pursued by the out of town police with any passion by those directly affected.

On the surface, HOLD THE DARK looks relatively straight forward. However, this is far more than a search for remains or a bloody quest for retribution against one of the animal kingdom's most deadly and skilled pack hunters. HOLD THE DARK is a violent and visually stunning story of misdirection and misguided meaning set in a place where curses are real and nightmares invade reality.

HOLD THE DARK is an exceptional read and will certainly feature as one of my top reads of the year.

http://justaguythatlikes2read.blogspo...

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would’ve never even known William Giraldi existed if it wasn’t for Jeremy Saulnier’s adaptation of this novel (available in Netflix) that my fiancée blackmailed me into watching last year. It turned out to be my favorite film of 2018.

So, I went in largely knowing what to expect and was largely seduced by Giraldi’s economy of style and confidence. He’s one of these authors that doesn’t feel the need to fill every gap and largely trusts his readers to connect the dots. And connecting the dots myself is one of my favorite things. What makes a narrative come truly alive is the crazy explicative scenarios it makes you come up witj in your mind and Hold the Dark is plenty alive.

It would’ve been even more magical if I hadn’t seen the movie first, but I can’t image that I’m alone here.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I became riveted by this book in the first chapter. Hold the Dark is about something primal or feral in all of us. The book begins with children being taken by wolves in Alaska after a brutal winter.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened 9/23/14 - 9/27/14
4 Stars: Recommended to fans of the kind of literature that's cold and dark and gets into your bones
Audio 6.7 hours
Publisher: Liveright Publishing / Blackstone Audio
Released: September 2014


I am not ashamed to admit that I was trolling downpour.com looking for something to fill my ears during the commute to work when I stumbled across Hold the Dark. I hadn't heard a peep about it (which is usually a sign that I am onto something), but the cover and title caught my attention right away, and the blurb sold me seconds later.

Set in an Alaskan village so far off the map you'd never know it existed unless you were born there or beckoned there, during the teeth-chattering and snot-freezing dead of winter, Hold the Dark is a twisted, chilling thriller of a story. The wolves are starving and desperate. Children are going missing. And when Medora Slone swears one took off with her son, she sends a letter off to wolf expert and nature writer Russell Core, begging him to come to the village to help her reclaim his bones.

As Russell attempts to settle in and starts digging into the goings-on in Keelut, Medora disappears and her husband Vernon returns from the war to discover the news of his son. With his crazy-ass childhood friend Cheeon in tow, Vernon goes on the hunt for his wife, driving deeper into the Alaskan wilderness, leaving a trail of dead bodies for local detective Donald Marium to clean up after him. Things are definitely not what they appear on the surface of this strange and unfriendly place and we soon discover that it's going to take a whole lot more than Russell and Marium to ebb the grieving father's desire for revenge.

Hold the Dark is an extremely dark and violent, slow moving, tension-filled tale that's meant to mess with your mind. In it, we witness the lengths to which an isolated village will go to stand together and protect its own. A place where law is not necessarily recognized and strange, murdery deeds typically go unquestioned. A place where a man will put himself through hell to get back the one thing he wants most and death will befall those who are dumb enough to get in his way.

William Giraldi's careful prose and simplistic world-building go a long way to pulling the reader in, despite it's slow place. His willful withholding is actually part of the book's charm. And the near-tender descriptions of his characters' violent acts render them almost beautiful. Kudos also to Blackstone Audio, for finding a reader capable of conveying the quiet fierceness of Giraldi's words.

My only real critique is the final chapter. Despite the fact that had a different feel to it, as if it was written by a different hand, it felt like a sad surrender to a story that could have, and should have, gone off in another direction. Perhaps by eliminating that last chapter, the book would have been stronger. Perhaps if Giraldi had a little more faith in his readers, he wouldn't have needed to take it that far? Look, if you're an attentive reader, you'll pick up on some of what Giraldi's laying out as he goes along; you'll already have a sense of what's coming, of where he's heading. Trust me. That final chapter just cleans up what should, in my opinion, remain a messier tale.

Also, can we get off the whole "comparing every new author to a super-famous author that they kind of sort of write similarly to" now? Can we, please? I've seen Giraldi compared to both Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway. Why? Because he writes sparse, bleak landscapes? Stop. Just stop. Let's not pollute the waters around a fresh and emerging writer. Let him be who he is without the pressures of having to stand as tall as our literary heroes. And let's just agree to enjoy the cold Alaskan landscape he sets his words in, as it freezes our skin solid and sends icy cold chills up and down our spines.

[Andrew “The Weirdling” Glos · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent books which is slightly misleading in the way it is packages, marketed, and presented. Based on the jacket, marketing, and first few chapters, most readers will expect to be settling in to a sort of murder mystery which we will be solved by the somewhat burnt out wolf expert, Russell Core. There is a murder. There is also a bit of a mystery as to how the murders came about. To be sure, the early chapters of the book have all the feel of being the opening salvo of some sort of not-your-usual-type-of-sleuth-mystery series, sure to contain 20-30 pulpy installments. The action, however, shifts away from Core early on. Instead, you are lead on a journey that takes you into the deepest darknesses that hide in the human mind. The book has far more in common with Heart of Darkness or Lord of the Flies than any formulaic, paint-by-numbers murder mystery. I won't go into the details on this one, except to say this: it is dark as hell, and you will be left with the conviction that when human beings break, we break badly.

There is very little I have to add that hasn't already been expressed by the other reviewers. I only which to add my own voice to the chorus of others who have said that this book is beautiful written. It is such a great juxtapositioning and adds to the overall feel. William Giraldi writes about utterly horrible things in a sublimely beautiful way, and it bugged me the whole way through the book, in all the right ways.

A great book, even if its not what I and many others expected.

[Carole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hold the Dark is one of the most unsettling, shocking and deeply disturbing books I've ever read. But it is also one of the most compelling.

The inhabitants of the Alaskan town of Keelut are not very friendly to outsiders, they look after their own, and they don't appreciate strangers coming and trying to meddle in their affairs. It is a sad and depressing town, but somehow this makes it more readable, more interesting .... what secrets are they hiding?

When the writer, Russell Core, makes a shocking discovery, the woman who had written to him and asked him to help find her son who was taken by wolves then disappears into the pitiless wilds of Alaska. But why? And why won't any of the villagers talk to him or help him?

Some of the incidents in the story are truly shocking, yet didn't stop me reading, I was totally engrossed in this darkest of dark tales, I wanted to know some answers and couldn't put it down. The writing was intelligent, never boring, always moving on, no words were wasted, I felt a sense of foreboding throughout.

A gripping and mysterious thriller that I would recommend to readers who enjoy a darker side to their novels.

Taken from Carole's Book Corner

[Joe Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I saw Jeremy Saulnier was directing the adaptation of William Giraldi's novel, I had to read it since I'm a huge fan of the director's work which includes the excellent Green Room as well as Blue Ruin, which by my standards is as close to cinematic perfection as one can get. Stark and McCarthy-esk, Hold the Dark is a quietly violent novel which asks questions about social norms, an individual's place in society, and the true discovery of self through nature. Gritty and uber-violent, the book follows the disappearance of a young boy in a remote Alaskan town. Wolves are the accused in the boy's disappearance but shortly after a wolf expert arrives on the scene everything slides down to hell in a hurry. A jarring and insightful read that takes turns unexpectedly with unsettling outcomes. Definitely enjoyed it and am looking forward to the film!

[Al · Rating 2 out of 5]

A short, violent book with a great deal of imaginative, if strained imagery. I've read a number of this kind recently, books which make me squirm with discomfort when the obvious marks of a Teacher of Creative Writing appear. The best part of this book is the author's evocation of the terrible Alaska winter. The not so good parts are the gratuitous violence (gratuitous because the motivation for most of it is not provided in the story and so it seems that the author must have added it just to make the book more saleable) and the strain for arty images at the expense of clarity. I found the whole thing overwrought, but those who like this sort of mash-up of violence and quasi-mysticism will obviously not agree.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very dark, disturbing and creepy story set in a remote village on the fringes of civilisation in Alaska where life is extremely hard and so are the people. A man is called to kill a wolf accused of taking children and he discovers a village full of secrets they do not want to share and a family with a dark tale. Although dark the writing was evocative and atmospheric.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you read Hold the Dark, you can be forgiven for drawing comparisons to Cormac McCarthy's Accent-on-Blood Meridian. This book's gutters run with it (blood, not meridians). Well, they do when it's above freezing, which it seldom is in this Alaska-based monster mash.

The monster in this case is Vernon Slone (why are they always named "Vern"?), an Iraq War veteran who honed his killing skills in a desert land only to bring them to the homeland, where he finds his young son dead and is out for revenge.

I guess it would be a "spoiler" (though nothing can spoil, really, at this temperature) to tell you WHO he's chasing, but that matters little. As the resident killing machine, he'll mow down anything that gets in his way. So he's chasing everybody. Reschedule your cruise.

Anyway, somehow, wolves play a role in all of this. A wolf expert slash author named Russell Core answers the call of Vernon's wife, Medora, who reports her son has been snapped up and snacked on by a big bad wolf.

This is not the only allusion to matters Grimm, I assure you. The Grimm (sic) Reaper is everywhere you look, giving a book about the wide-open expanses of Alaska a claustrophobic feel. Credit author Giraldi for one thing, though. He took a minute and a single line to plant a shout-out to Christopher McCandless, the lonesome loser who dies in the book Into the Wild in an unforgiving Alaska outback. How else do you explain the fading yellow school bus Slone stumbles past in the middle of his flights?

This book scores kudos from high places -- people like Tim O'Brien and Thomas McGuane, for instance -- and I don't contest it is well-written. People, it is well-written! So if you like well-written gore, please, jump in. The corpuscles are fine.

And it's not so much that I'm 3-star, so-so-ing this because of its shock value, either. It's the ending that did it in. Big time.

Again, the rules of spoilerdom prevent me from full venting, but let's just say the big-boy blood gets undermined in a big way by some rather childish, Freudian finishing work. Reading it, you might be forgiven for speaking aloud: "Are. You. Kidding. Me?" In that order.

But hey, at 201 pp., it's an easy punt to agree or disagree with me. Have at it! Just remember that Little Red Riding Hood's healthy blush might just be blood and lots of it.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

5

I really enjoyed this novel and I will now check out the Netflix film by Jeremy Saulnier who is one of my favourite emerging filmmakers. The storyline is crazy, I can't really explain it any other way and to give you anything more will be a disservice to the reader or viewer. William Giraldi has crafted one of my favourite reads of 2018 and it is amazing it would be the last book of the year.

William Giraldi writes with an air of unpredictability and viciousness, unlike other authors I have read. This story is not for the faint of heart and won't please the average reader, I can see many who were annoyed that it took the detour from the description on the back of the novel. I couldn't believe what I was reading, I had to flip the novel over and once I had that story change out of head, it was game on. Russell Core is a broken character who is living a life of exile himself, but feels the need to assist with a wife who has had her son taken by wolves. His internal coldness is soon shared by the viotile township and weather conditions, but also in the husband and father.

Why the 5?

I have read a lot of books over the year and this is the one that stays with me the most. You don't get a lot of answers and if the film sticks to the story, people will be throwing rocks at the Tv. I understand why people don't like it, but I loved every page and couldn't put it down. Certain books click with me and this is one of them. William Giraldi hasn't a lot of works, but I will be looking to read another in the later half of the year and will recommend this book to everyone. I honestly thought I was reading a book about a man hunting wolves, that could have been about a serial killer who everybody thinks is a wolf. This couldn't have been further from the truth and I'm happy the book twisted the narrative to deliver something unique and truly harrowing.

[Farrell McGeoghan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I made a goodreads account just to hopefully prevent anyone else from wasting their time on this book like I did.

In some places it is advertised as 'Wolves take children from a small Alaskan village, man comes to help' in the vein of a survival horror or possibly supernatural horror novel, and the book even starts out in this regard. Unfortunately, it is neither. It is pretty much a story about one man's rampage and him killing almost everyone he interacts with for poorly described reasons, with added (obvious) twist at the end that has no real impact on anything.

This is also advertised as a 'literary thriller'. What this actually means is a book where in-between an astounding amount of descriptions of people getting their heads blown off, the author randomly jams thoughtful sounding metaphors that make no real sense which juxtapose the actual pulpy action novel this is. I can only assume he thinks putting these weird 'literary' metaphors and cliches makes him some kind of Hemingway.

In addition, from the very beginning, I found the dialogue to be really strange. It often felt like I was reading a chat log of two online bots talking to each other, rather than actual human conversations. Also, sometimes the way dialogue was written, it actually became confusing who was saying what, although this was in the minority.

I've read books before I've found boring or not liked so much, which is fine as not everyone can like everything, but I've still appreciated them for what they were. I don't see any value at all in this book. Please don't waste your time!

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hold The Dark – Dark ever so Dark

Hold The Dark by William Giraldi may be short but it certainly packs a punch. This book is an intense examination of all that is primeval within us that is so intense set on the frozen wastes of Alaska. Where the wolf and humans live cheek by jowl and recognise each other as supreme hunters.

The book begins with a mystery when the wolves have come and taken three children from the isolated village of Keelut. They have also taken the child of Medora and Vernon Sloane and Medora sends for the wolf expert Russell Core to find him. Core discovers that there is a dark core to Medora and the village is awash with secrets. Secrets the people of Keelut do not want to share with outsides that they do not trust.

When Vernon Slone returns from a desert war to find his child dead and his wife missing so begins a vengeful and frantic search for his wife and will not hesitate to kill anyone that tries to stop him. The race across the frozen tundra Core is desperate to protect Medora from her husband and it is through this search he discovers the dark heart of Keelut and its secret.

Hold The Dark is a stunning but short thriller that can send a chill through you. It holds a light up to the dark edges of civilisation and really does ask questions of the reader.

[Laura Fairly · Rating 1 out of 5]

It just tried too hard on almost every page.

[Lucille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! This one blew my mind, knocked me right on my ass, and iditarodded straight to my Favorites Shelf. A masterpiece of myth mixed with murder (that being the standard concoction. Well, here’s the spin:)

AND muk luks too lol!

[Liz Barnsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fast and haunting read – extremely atmospheric, beautifully written, with a dark heart.

When wolf expert Russell Core arrives to help Medora track down her son’s body and track the wolf that took him, he embarks on a dangerous and violent journey where not everything is as it first appears. When Vernon arrives back from war to discover the tragedy, he is after vengeance and begins a bloody pursuit across the Alaskan landscape.

I read this in one sitting – descriptively speaking it is extremely well done, although very violent in places which may disturb some people. For me it just added to the haunting feel this read gives you, often quite frightening but always pulling you along in order to find out what has happened to the children of Keelut and what will happen to Medora and Russell.

Medora is a fascinating character – not terribly likeable, I found it hard to have sympathy either for her or Vernon, despite their tragic loss. Everyone in this remote and cold location live a hard life, there are secrets waiting to be uncovered that are both horrifying and intriguing all at the same time. I was enthralled and, to be honest by the end, somewhat confused by certain parts.

Overall a terrific read, although I would perhaps have liked a little more closure when it comes to certain plot arcs, however this was a chilling and expressive story and I would recommend it for fans of Literary thrillers.

Happy Reading Folks!

[DJ_Keyser · Rating 5 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed the film adapted from William Giraldi’s novel, but was measuring my expectations when it came to finally reading the book. I needn’t have. Hold the Dark is a tour de force, a brutal clash of the modern and the mythical, man and animal, good and evil, the warmth of a crackling fire and the cutting cold of a frozen tundra. Giraldi’s prose is superb, lending adequate weight to the persistent solemnity of unfolding events. An impeccable read.