Maxim Loskutoff

Ruthie Fear

This searing debut reimagines the American West through linked stories describing a violent rural separatist movement.

Stories

Come West and See

In this novel about the end of the frontier dream, a logger builds a cabin near a recluse named Ted Kaczynski.

Old King

An NPR "Best Book of the Year" "Eerily atmospheric, keep-you-up-late suspenseful." --Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle In this haunting novel about the end of the frontier dream, a man tries to reinvent himself in one of America's last wild territories, while his neighbor begins a crime spree that will tremble the nation.

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).

Winner of the 2021 High Plains Book Award in Fiction and the 2021 Montana Innovation Award In this haunting parable of the American West, a young woman faces the violent past of her remote Montana valley. As a child in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, Ruthie Fear sees an apparition: a strange, headless creature near a canyon creek. Its presence haunts her throughout her youth. Raised in a trailer by her stubborn, bowhunting father, Ruthie develops a powerful connection with the natural world but struggles to find her place in a society shaped by men. Development, gun violence, and her father’s vendettas threaten her mountain home. As she comes of age, her small community begins to fracture in the face of class tension and encroaching natural disaster, and the creature she saw long ago reappears as a portent of the valley’s final reckoning. An entirely new kind of western and the first novel from one of this generation’s most wildly imaginative writers, Ruthie Fear captures the destruction and rebirth of the modern American West with warmth, urgency, and grandeur. The Technicolor bursts of action that test Ruthie’s commitment to the valley and its people invite us to look closer at our nation’s complicated legacy of manifest destiny, mass shootings, and environmental destruction. Anchored by its unforgettable heroine, Ruthie Fear presents the rural West as a place balanced on a knife-edge, at war with itself, but still unbearably beautiful and full of love.

Maxim Loskutoff

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