PositiveThe New York Journal of BooksCharacters in these stories are made compelling by the rawness of their loneliness and deviancies. They are often riveting in the honesty displayed in their confessions to perversity, or in their unwitting unguardedness about unusual or troubling predilections ... Line-by-line these stories are carried by sharp, vivid prose. The beauty of the natural world often peeks through in spite of the human snarls throwing up static in and around it. Loskutoff has a good eye for the details of the story’s widespread Western locales ... The stories are also admirable for an unflinching gaze upon human alienation, perversity, and depravity that also seems to encompass kindness, understanding, and forgiveness ... One could quibble a bit with the collection’s hazy treatment of the Redoubt and the war...The lawlessness holding sway in some of the later stories, especially emanating from the federal side, seems farfetched ... Still, the effect of this decision may also be viewed as a strength, locating the reader in a provocative place between the two problematic poles and needing to make our own decision about how we might best go forward so as to avoid this outcome, or one anywhere close to it, in our American West.
