Goat Mountain - by David Vann (Paperback)

About the Book

In David Vann's searing novel Goat Mountain, an 11-year-old boy at his family's annual deer hunt is eager to make his first kill. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably. In prose devastating and beautiful in its precision, David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions--what we owe for what we've done. David Vann is the award-winning author of Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth.

Book Synopsis

In David Vann's searing novel Goat Mountain, an 11-year-old boy at his family's annual deer hunt is eager to make his first kill. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably.

In prose devastating and beautiful in its precision, David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions--what we owe for what we've done.

David Vann is the award-winning author of Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth.

From the Back Cover

Finalist for the California Book Award

In the fall of 1978, on a 640-acre family ranch on Goat Mountain in northern California, an eleven-year-old boy joins his grandfather, father, and father's best friend on the family's annual deer hunt.

Goat Mountain is what this family owns and where they belong. It is where their history is kept, memories and stories that they share on each return visit. And for the first time, the boy's story will be added, if he can find a buck. Itching to shoot, he is ready.

When the men arrive at the gate to their land, the father discovers a poacher and sights him through the scope of his gun. He offers his son a look--a simple act that will explode in tragedy and transform these men and this family. David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel, in prose devastating and beautiful in its precision, that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions--what we owe for what we've done.

Review Quotes

"Readers will devour Vann's masterful plotting." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Meet David Vann, one the most talented writers in the American West. Goat Mountain, with all its responsibility and recriminations, is the man at his absolute finest." - Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries
"[Goat Mountain] may just may be his finest, most contemplative work to date." - Booklist
"Vann's third novel is his most visceral yet: a grinding examination of killing, God and the unnamable forces that create a dynasty of violence. . . . This book is as all of Vann's fiction: provocative and unforgiving." - Kirkus Reviews
"The Story has the power of a bullet fired from a gun." - The Economist
"[A] deep meditation on death, religion and legacy." - San Jose Mercury News
"Vann has crafted a gripping masterpiece" - Anchorage Daily News
"No one writing today has transformed the events of his own life into thrilling fiction more memorably than David Vann in Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island. Now in Goat Mountain he has done it again, with even greater force and artistry, giving us a story of family bonds, betrayal, fate. This book is written on the edge, a story of legacies, cruelty, the mysteries of DNA and blood, rewarding the reader sentence by sentence and scene by scene right to the astonishing and terrifying ending." - Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek
"This book is written on the edge, a story of legacies, cruelty, the mysteries of DNA and blood, rewarding the reader sentence by sentence and scene by scene right to the astonishing and terrifying ending." - Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek
"David Vann is at once the most timely and timeless of writers . . . Goat Mountain is a ravishing example of his mastery. . . . This book will touch you to the depths of our shared, flawed humanity." - Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"You've been waiting a long time for a novel that'll capture your attention like this does, which makes Goat Mountain the book to hunt for." - The Clermont Sun
"[M]asterful plotting." - San Francisco Chronicle
"The book is wonderfully twisted, but a sinister humor keeps things from getting too bleak. What begins as a literary family drama turns slowly into a heady horror story, part Stephen King and part Immanuel Kant." - Daily Beast
"Shocking. . . . The author's descriptions of the northern California landscape--the chaparral, woods, and mountains-are also masterly. . . . This beautifully realized novel is recommended for fans of literary fiction but is not for the faint of heart." - Library Journal (starred review)
"Vann has an extravagantly literary sensibility, and his novel is full of echoes: One thinks of the stately inevitability of classical tragedy, of Chekhov's lost souls, of the hallucinatory quality of Faulkner's rural fantasia, and of Stephen King's depictions of an unraveling mind." - Washington Post Book World
"There's a lot of humor here, of a very dark vein. And Vann, a Guggenheim fellow, excels at sly truths." - Boston Globe
"Brilliant narrative. . . . This is a novel of violence, destruction and ruin. There is no salvation. And yet Mr. Vann's soaring writing carries it forward-a reminder of the beauty that can grace even the beastliest things." - The Economist