About this item
Highlights
- 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.
- Author(s): David Vann
- 256 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
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
"[Goat Mountain] may just may be his finest, most contemplative work to date." -- Booklist
"[M]asterful plotting." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"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
"Vann has crafted a gripping masterpiece" -- Anchorage Daily News
"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'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
"[A] deep meditation on death, religion and legacy." -- San Jose Mercury News
"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
"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
"The Story has the power of a bullet fired from a gun." -- The Economist