Title: Black River Author: S.M. Hulse
Published: January 20, 2015
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 240
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:A former prison guard and talented fiddler returns to his Montana hometown to bury his wife and confront the inmate who, twenty years ago, held him hostage during a prison riot.
When Wes Carver returns to Black River, he carries two things in the cab of his truck: his wife's ashes and a letter from the prison parole board. The convict who held him hostage during a riot, twenty years ago, is being considered for release.
Wes has been away from Black River ever since the riot. He grew up in this small Montana town, encircled by mountains, and, like his father before him and most of the men there, he made his living as a Corrections Officer. A talented, natural fiddler, he found solace and joy in his music. But during that riot Bobby Williams changed everything for Wes — undermining his faith and taking away his ability to play.
How can a man who once embodied evil ever come to good? How can he pay for such crimes with anything but his life? As Wes considers his own choices and grieves for all he's lost, he must decide what he believes and whether he can let Williams walk away.
At its surface, Black River is a sleepy, almost lethargic story, and beneath that are dark undercurrents of tension and fear, the kind of emotion that you don’t just read, you feel. I wish I could do this book justice, but I can’t. S.M. Hulse’s debut is, quite simply, stunning—stunning and brutal, in ways I never thought I could experience through fiction. I honestly think this novel is a masterpiece.
Emotions in the book run high and sharp, and in ways you wouldn’t expect. It wasn’t the scenes where Wesley, a prison corrections officer, was being tortured during a prison riot that got me. It was the scene where Wesley and his estranged stepson talk about Wesley’s scars. It was the scene where Wesley’s wife catches him cutting in the bathroom. It was the scene where Wesley covers a dying horse with a blanket and sits with it in the field. Black River finds the tension and the fragility in little moments, and draws them out.
Hulse is, without a doubt, an author who knows what she’s doing. She has control over her language, and can juggle more than one thing at once. She can create a protagonist who has faults so huge the reader second-guesses if Wesley is even a good person, but in the next paragraph, the author twists things again until you want everything for Wesley, to atone for what’s been taken away.
The prose, the characterization, the emotion. It’s all there, and with the weight of an author who writes with authority. Hulse didn’t set Black River in Montana because she could—she did it because that setting is where this story needed to happen, and that the author understands the landscape and the culture is evident. The establishment of place and atmosphere in this book is subtle, often only a phrase or a brief image, but it’s powerful, providing a stark backdrop for Wesley’s narrative.
This novel is an intense, painful character study that withholds nothing. S.M. Hulse writes with clear, savage emotion and an understanding of her characters that is honestly brilliant. Black River is dark and somber and tough, a combination that’s managed perfectly, and to great effect.
