Mark Spragg
Some places, William Faulkner and John Updike would attest, stay with you forever.
Updike wrote his best novels - most of his novels - about small-town Pennsylvania. Faulkner set his works almost exclusively in the fictional Mississippi town of Jefferson. Following suit, author Mark Spragg writes what he knows.
And Spragg knows Wyoming.
Like Spragg's two previous novels, Bone Fire is set in Ishawooa, Wyoming, near his hometown of Cody. The novel follows 80-year-old rancher Einar and the people in his life who, for unique reasons, can't leave Ishawooa.
This is not, however, the pastoral Wyoming Einar grew up in. In the summertime, the town is overrun with camera-toting tourists: "A couple times in the past year a woman in city clothes had asked to take his picture, and he'd enjoyed the experience. It made him feel he hadn't faded away altogether, that he was still somehow worthy of notice, even if only as a sort of rural oddity."
Einar is, nevertheless, more than a tourist attraction or "rural oddity." In recent years, he has buried his wife and only child and, at 80, he is increasingly aware of his own mortality. Against his wishes, Einar's granddaughter, Griff, has dropped out of college to care for him, while she sorts out a complicated relationship with her long-time boyfriend. As Einar is contemplating his end, Griff is searching for her beginning.
In a parallel plot, Crane, the town sheriff, finds a murdered teenager in a methamphetamine lab - one more reminder that this is not the old west of Zane Grey - and begins a strenuous search for the killer. Crane is in the early stages of a neurodegenerative disease and is struggling to catch the culprit and salvage his marriage (to Griff's mother) while he is still able.
Though the plot is often tangled, Bone Fire is a starkly beautiful portrait of the modern West. Spragg is an author with a keen eye for both the poetic splendors and ugly realities of this much-romanticized country.
It is clear, too, that Spragg is as engrossed in the lives of his characters as he is the rural terrain of his home state. Einar and Crane are by no means new characters; both factored prominently in his two previous works of fiction, The Fruit of Stone and An Unfinished Life, the latter of which was adapted into a Miramax film of the same name.
The most apparent flaw in much of Spragg's writing is a degree of untidiness - loose ends and abundant subplots - which is at least partially a byproduct of his characters' complexity.
But, despite the hardships portrayed, the lasting image of Bone Fire is one of a tranquil Wyoming rancher, seated before a fire, contented with life and accepting death. Mark Spragg is a master of western melancholy.
Joe Darda is a writer and editor living in Seattle, Wash.