Come West and See: Stories

by Maxim Loskutoff

An NPR Best Book of 2018

"Devastating.…Grows increasingly bizarre and haunting until it’s left an indelible mark." ―Janet Maslin, New York Times In an isolated region of Idaho, Montana, and eastern Oregon, an armed occupation of a wildlife refuge escalates into civil war. Against this backdrop, Maxim Loskutoff shatters the myths of the West: a lonesome trapper falls in love with a bear; a newly married woman hatches a plot to murder a tree; and an unemployed millworker joins a militia after returning home. Written with “blade-sharp prose” ( Electric Literature ), the twelve stories in this debut collection expose the simmering rage and resentments of small-town America “with extraordinary eloquence and compassion” ( National Book Review ).

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, American, Westerns, Adult, Politics

240 pages, Paperback

First published May 8, 2018

About the author

Two-time winner of the High Plains Book Award, Maxim Loskutoff is the author of the novels OLD KING and RUTHIE FEAR and the story collection COME WEST AND SEE. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, and GQ. Other honors include the Nelson Algren Award and the Montana Innovation Award. A Yaddo and MacDowell fellow, he lives in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana where he was raised.

Reviews

[Michelle Arredondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you discover a very strange....very intriguing...read.

I went in blindly. I am glad that I did. It made for a rich experience. In Come West and See...stories...by Maxim Loskutoff...I was enticed by such strange and vivid stories. Atmospheric. Odd but likable characters, odd but unlikable characters...characters I didn't know what to think of them. Every setting was unusual to anything I know. Each story stands on it's own and pulls you in...all very different...yet all have similarities. A story about a burgeoning desire to know a beast of an animal....a truly WTF moment. No seriously....I had an WTF moment and I felt a little silly...a bit bashful to think that my interpretation was "somehow in this story some bestiality is going to happen...but with a bear??!!" Call me amateurish for not being a more seasoned interpreter of contemporary abstract reads and maybe I read the whole thing wrong. But I was intrigued....oh, I was completely in it for the long haul.

In the entirety of the book there is a hostile movement occurring with the citizens of the Western United States and the government. Each story lends some backdrop or feeling of angst or defiance or desperate thoughts about the ongoing struggle. Author Maxim Loskutoff does not over do it...or bog it down...or make it too harsh a theme. It's just enough to make us aware of what the characters are going through..and puts in spaces, scenery, scenarios..that they are ingesting around them.

A beautiful...startling...noteworthy read..with a beautiful eye catching cover. I highly recommend.

I won this book. I read this book. I gave my honest and volunteered thoughts on this book.

[Edie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was SO looking forward to this book but god it was so boring and uninspired. Men trying to imagine the inner lives of women honestly can’t even begin to scratch the surface of the complexity of being a woman in West. One story stood out to me as having promise - We’re in this together you know, God - but otherwise this was a stack of half baked, unrelated stories that had nothing to do with the supposed topic (an armed group a la the Bundys) that I would have expected from someone’s college boyfriend who thought he was ~~~so edgy because he smoked pot and was a libertarian. Spare me.

[Deadohiosky77 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful and lovely collection of stories loosely linked by a separatist movement going on in the western United States. Every story is great, but the standout story for me was “Stay Here”. Utterly heartbreaking and gorgeous. Definitely worth reading for anyone who enjoys short stories.

[Steve Felt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Come West and See is an interesting collection of stories with a loose theme of The American Redoubt imagined before, during, and after a significant uprising and armed conflict. I may have expected too much of this book given all the positive press and reviews. I found it "Okay." It was an easy read, but I found myself yearning for a story where the flaws in the characters did not demand most of the stories' energy. I appreciated the different perspective, but I ended up feeling that anyone who is part of the American Redoubt has character flaws, more character flaws than most people. Those character flaws are the reason they feel outcast and then eventually band together. For me, the stories would have been far more interesting exploring other aspects of why certain people identify with the American Redoubt.

[Gwen Florio]

Didn't expect to like this. Loved it. Loskutoff is a wonderful writer, and his stories show great empathy for people too often depicted as cartoonish, one-dimensional. Can't wait to see what he writes next.

[Isabel Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This debut collection of short stories by Maxim Loskutoff portrays snapshot-style glances of various folks, their loved ones, and their living situations in an American atmosphere where a new civil war is taking place. Instead of the Southern states succeeding as was the case in the 1860s during the American Civil War, a number of Western states have separated themselves from the remainder of the country in an act of rebellion. At times reassuring and at times disturbing, the 12 stories include accounts of separatists, loyalists, and the people in between. One of the most striking and memorable stories for me was “We’re In This Together You Know, God.” In this story, a woman describes the lifestyle of her struggling, rural family and the extra strain that their young, psychotic daughter adds to the mix. Its main focus is on the tumultuous relationship between her family and her daughter, but the tragic relationship between their horses and her daughter is also explored. Similarly, the other stories in Come West and See all focus on some sort of relationship and/or conflict, whether it’s man vs. man, man vs. animal, or man vs. nature. Loskutoff has a knack for portraying the dejected and the crestfallen, the brooding and the wrathful. Take a peek at his story collection if you’re in the mood for something complex and strange with an element of truth packed alongside it.

[Shoshana Goldberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were moments of brilliance in this book. And Loskutoff is, undoubtably, a very good writer. But..just...ugh. I'm bummed, because the premise seemed interesting, and I was excited to read fiction about the Redoubt from a person who actually is from the region, but this book just didn't do it for me.

It took 'show, don't tell' to the extreme, keeping things unnecessarily obtuse and confusing--and while this may work for some readers, I didn't feel the payoff at the end was good enough to justify the means. The short stories varied from ALL aesthetic (complete with characters who were 'mysterious' and 'etherial' and 'different,' but to no end, and with no clear motivation for any of their actions--plus bestiality) to FULL 'forgotten white men in Trump's America' cliche, complete with rants and inner-monologues that sound like Trump supporter-mocking copy-pasta. At it's best, it read like 'smartest white dude in your MFA class,' and at its worst it was just....not good.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read. A little out of the norm but this is a collection of short stories that all take place in the NW at different eras, every story grabs a hold of you and won't let go. Just try to stop reading in the middle of one of these stories, you can't, once you start one you will finish it in one setting, you just can't put it down until you've finished it. Good thing these stories are not very long. I highly recommend this book. Maxim Loskutoff has written a collection of short stories, each one better than the one before, that you are going to love. This is what the future of literature looks like.

[Mahi Senthilkumar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to quit after reading a third of it. Loskutoff’s female characters (some of whom are disabled or disfigured) are treated more like props than people. The first story is surrealist and funny, but afterwards the collection fell into the depressing pattern of stories about women suffering because of men close to them. The pain experienced by the female characters starts to read as self-indulgent. This book borders on trauma voyeurism/trauma porn and ultimately does a disservice to real people from the rural west who are strong and complex and who I thought would be better represented here.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book of short stories, each woven together by threads of a western separatist land rights movement not unlike the Sagebrush Rebellion. Loskutoff had amazing prose, even if the narrative wasn’t always that interesting. Many of his one-liners stopped me in my tracks and I reread them three or four times because they said things so familiar to me but which I could never put into words. Some of my favorites: Ways to Kill a Tree; We’re in this Together You Know, God; and End Times.

[Varina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had high hopes for this one, but I couldn't get past the portrayal of the female characters. They are definitely flat compared to their moody male counterparts, treated cruelly throughout, and fall prey to tired female archetypes. Some of the stories in this collection are worth a read, but I think Loskutoff has mischaracterized (and whitewashed) the West. I couldn't tell if he was trying to humanize or mock his characters and overall I was disappointed.

[Rachael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overarching themes: the men are strong and hard-working, and as victims of their upbringing they are violent and confused, while the women are ungrateful shrews, can't even go into more depth because they weren't given anything beyond this to comment on.

[Noah Hendel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike anything I’ve read before. Extremely weird stories—some off-putting—but amazingly vivid.

[M.G. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beastiality in the first few pages. Very quirky read. This book just wasn't for me.

[Sydney Peterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked every story individually, but as a collection it didn't work for me.
There are some really great stories in here. I really enjoyed 'The Dancing Bear', 'We're in this Together You Know, God', 'Ways to Kill a Tree', and 'Prey'.
The prose is really beautiful, and Loskutoff creates some very interesting characters. There are plenty of despicable characters that you hate, love, or pity. I think he does a very good job of describing people who feel abandoned or aimless.
However, his depiction of female characters was really icky sometimes. Every single female character is traumatized or broken or fucked up in some way. It worked in each of the stories individually- if I had read all of these stories months apart and didn't know that they were by the same author, I wouldn't have noticed it. None of the depictions of women are that terrible, and fucked up and broken women absolutely do exist. Women have sexual trauma, women self-harm, women leave their husbands, women experience loss, all of these things absolutely happen. But this book diminishes its women to only these experiences, and sexualizes them in these situations. Once I got to 'Harvest' and 'The Redoubt' I was so so so so tired of seeing women as a traumatized sexual prop that I hated those stories. The language surrounding women and female trauma was just too sexual and repetitive and made all of the women feel like a prop.
The other thing that I didn't like about these stories as a collection was how they were connected. Most of them take place in the same general area/time period, and some contain direct references to other stories in the collection. But others are completely unrelated. I thought the references to other stories usually felt a little forced. Also the huge jump in the timeline felt forced and a little lazy. There was a cool idea about a second American civil war, but it felt like it came out of nowhere in the last three stories and wasn't fleshed out enough to feel concrete.
Good stories, bad female characters, iffy as a collection.

[Takumo-N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written stories about people wanting to escape where they are, in northwestern United States. Interconnected by a conflict of the federal government wanting to appropiate land and the author putting us in the middle of this characters struggles when they left the conflict and thought they could have normal lifes in the middle of nowhere, almost at the point of giving up everything when they see it won't be easy. It's pretty heartbreaking seeing that everyone is so paranoid and impolite, obviously it is exaggerated here where it seems the beginning of a revolution, but you can encounter weird unhinged people like these in the USA, unfortunately.

It seems like everyone who's mad about anything finds a reason to go. More freedom, more justice, or more bullshit. As if large numbers of pissed-off men with guns ever led to justice.

[Christine Convery · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a bit to get into this, and I still wonder if I might like it better as a novel, but this story collection was incredibly well written and different from anything else I've read. Sort of speculative fiction but of the near future and very regionally focused with stories that lightly touch each other and characters that are largely terrible but somehow you're still sympathetic to them.

[John Treat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable stories, all of them. Loskutoff gets one part of The Redoubt right simply acknowledging that it exists, something a lot of writers who say something about this region don’t notice. Terrific and terrifying all at once.

[🎰 · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5
a little too civilized. harvest and prey are the most interesting ones

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hauntingly beautiful debut. Radical empathy indeed. I loved all the stories but, if I had to choose, "Stay Here"is the one I would take to a desert island. As someone who dearly loves yet deeply mourns for the West I believe Loskutoff's voice is of vital importance. Our nation's ongoing conversation about these vast swaths of land and its inhabitants deserve more nuanced reflections like this. A must read.

[Adam Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

***I received an Advanced Reader Copy of this book in exchange for reviewing it on Goodreads.***

The blurbs on the back of this book had me worried. They give the impression that this is a book that glorifies the separatists movements in the Western United States, as well as a blurb that claims this book is "A ferocious love letter to the forgotten and the scorned...unlike any book you'll read this year. It blazes with soul." which is an impressive series of sentences if you are trying to get me to never read a book. Therefore I was a bit nervous that I was going to Hate this book.

The very first page of this book had me hopeful. A very poetic, but not flowery or verbose, description of a bear. I was excited to see where it was going. On page two, I found myself asking "Does this guy want to...fuck a bear? Where is this going?"

The first story, "The Dancing Bear" took the story of a guy who finds himself wanting to fuck a bear to places I wasn't prepared to go, but was not unhappy to arrive at. (This is your only spoiler: he does not fuck the bear)

This was true of much of the stories in this collection. The thread that connects most of these stories is that there is a separatist movement (or possibly several separatist movements intertwining) in the Western United States. The stories never do more than flirt with the borders of the movement. Rather, they focus on how the standoff impacts the people around the movement, whether they are merely people geographically tangential to the separatists, or people who have lost family, friends, or livelihood to the standoff. We also get stories about people whose situations have them actively considering whether or not to join the movement.

But this is not a love story to this fictional movement (based on several less fictional movements, such as The Bundy standoff). Almost all of the characters who consider joining the movement, or who are associated with the movement, are presented as people who routinely make awful decisions at the expense of those they love. Not villains, but assholes, or idiots. People you want to shake and say "stop fucking up". It's impressive that, with a few exceptions, I neither hated nor felt any pity for most of the characters in this book, yet I was invested in their stories. The stories didn't seem to aim for my emotions, rather they presented believable protagonists and side characters, and tended more to small stakes scenarios than bombast.

"End Times", "Ways To Kill A Tree", "Prey", and "Harvest" (which certainly falls more on the bombast side) were my favorites of the collection. "Too Much Love" was the only time when I found myself skipping paragraphs to see if it was going anywhere interesting.

I would recommend this book for people looking for realistic and character-driven stories, fans of Spoon River Anthology who prefer twenty page long short stories to page long eulogies, people exhausted by stories that take place in New York as if it's the only place in America worth writing about, guys who are really into bears (but not in the queer subculture way), people looking for morality stories that pose interesting questions instead of claiming to present answers.

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good novel in stories that I maybe wouldn't *quite* give four stars. Ends up taking a dystopian turn where it could've fleshed out the revolution/civil war a bit more rather than leaping so far in time. Reminds me of Claire Vaye Watkins's collection of new-West stories BATTLEBORN. But are really sharp in terms of craft, but both are also overwhelmingly about the white male gaze. No real engagement here with Indigenous people/issues, despite the fact that it so clearly draws on the Bundy occupation (which Native peoples were vocal about) and is in stream with Standing Rock )and Wounded Knee decades earlier). Ends up being a bit of Civil War narrative retold in the near future, which is sort of neat. Also pretty rich for anyone interested in animal studies or environmental humanities more broadly.

[Joshua · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was unsure what to expect with this book. I picked it up after reading the teaser and noticing the parallels with the Malheur occupation. Even though it was a quick read, the book left me with mixed emotions. These are a series of short stories that are loosely connected through a background narrative that is only hinted at most of the time. While the prose itself is well-constructed, I felt like I needed more from the characters. None of the stories ever came to a meaningful conclusion. Truthfully, I was more interested in the background plot of the Redoubt, a separatist, fundamentalist movement that would give Cliven Bundy wet dreams. The entire book felt like a preamble to a bigger story, even as it focused heavily on small vignettes of personal narratives. I'd recommend this to anyone who has ever lived west of the Rockies or attempted to debate a Trump supporter.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited for this book, particularly because I’m an Oregonian who is occasionally preoccupied by 3 percenters and their ilk, but it mostly fell flat for me. Some of the stories were derivative — one in particular is clearly a riff on a tired internet meme — and others were shocking for shock value alone. I was most put off when Loskutoff focused on women’s vaginas, imagining how they feel to men pre- and post-childbirth, or how they feel to women during childbirth. There was a great chasm between the experience of having a vagina and whatever Loskutoff imagines, and his desire to return to the subject struck me as both odd and obtuse. One lone story — “Ways to Kill a Tree” — compelled me. The rest, I wish I had skipped.

[Wes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mother explains to her daughter — a little sociopath who will stalk my slumber for years — the facts of her burgeoning body. A western settler confronts squirmy feelings towards an advancing and hungry bear. New parents find a much-needed joyful afternoon suddenly threaded with a malice which forces them to confront their mutual infidelity and individual dark histories. The connecting thread of extremism is a mirror of our times that leaves the skin feeling silty and coarse but the stories do not entirely abandon joy, giving the book a scope that makes it feel like a real gift.

[Haley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

Honestly, I picked up this collection because the title is evocative, and I adore it. But the stories were just alright for me. "Stay Here", "We're in this Together You Know, God", and "Harvest" were my favorites and the standouts "Stay Here" had me grinning on the subway and reminiscing about my childhood summers. "We're in this Together" was chilling and creepy. I can't believe I'm saying I really liked "Harvest", but I did because the author gave a girl agency in a situation where I didn't think she would have any--and she got out.

[Kat Libby · Rating 2 out of 5]

A badly marketed collection of short stories. Smacks you upside the head with one overbearing and obnoxious theme: bestiality/humans as animals. The relation to "The Redoubt" and any valuable connection to the real life takeover of a wildlife preserve is tenuous and honestly felt like a convenient way to hop on the country's fascination and disgust with political extremism. One of my most disliked reads this year.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of went downhill after the beastiality story, but a nice cup of malaise and frustration

[Louise · Rating 1 out of 5]

I GOT THIS AS A GIVEAWAY BUT IT WASNT WHAT I THOUGHT IT WAS. I REALLY DIDNT UNDERSTAND IT.

[Crystal · Rating 1 out of 5]

Women just exist to suffer at the hands of repulsive male characters in this book. They have no inner life. They are not fully realized. They are just there as the props of men.

DNF.