RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWhile readers of his three earlier Grouse County novels will certainly feel the pleasure of encountering old friends, West of Loveland can be read satisfyingly on its own. The characters feel quickly familiar. The novel attends to their quiet conversations, their modest meals, their everyday work, whether caring for the sick, staffing a thrift shop or demolishing a silo ... Even his many felicitous turns of phrase — and there are many — are so unassuming that it takes some time to realize how powerful or clever they are ... The dialogue is crisp and often very funny. I suspect that some readers, drawn to the central mystery promised by the gun, will find themselves expecting more of a sensational turn, or the possibility of more dramatic violence. But while Chekhov’s rule is indeed satisfied (the gun, or a gun, goes off), I think such expectations miss the complexity of Drury’s project.
Jón Kalman Stefánsson
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Each story could stand on its own; one of the pleasures of the novel is the slow revelation of their connections. This is a tale of heritage, a topic hardly unique to Iceland, and yet it was impossible not to feel that it shares many of the same preoccupations—genealogical and topographical—with classic 13th- and 14th-century Icelandic family sagas ... The structure of Your Absence Is Darkness is best described as a series of recursions: The stories build and break apart, yield to other stories, emerge again later, sometimes at length, sometimes in fragments, flashbacks, single words. The effect is kaleidoscopic; as the narrative turns, pieces shift, stories merge, themes dilate and contract. I fantasized about an edition printed in color, each narrative strand a hue of its own, the shuttling, shuffling syntax fractal in its effect ... In linking remembering to re-creation, he uses amnesia to bring author and reader together as common travelers into the unknown. For what are we upon opening a new book if not amnesiac? We must have our new lives created for us. Either it must be explicitly explained, or we must piece together clues, must eavesdrop. We too appear in the churchyard without memory, and meet the world anew.\
