It requires no genius to be disgusted with our culture these days, but Gary Indiana expresses his own disdain with a rare intelligence. The essays collected in Fire Season are erudite, discomforting and often caustic — and almost always spot on, which is a little sad because they tell us such ugly true things ... presents 35 years of his political and cultural criticism, much of it chilling to read in hindsight ... These essays are not arranged chronologically or by topic; they seem ordered to carefully explicate a darkness that has 'been allowed to metastasize ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan,' but is rooted in the Kennedy assassination. That frames Indiana’s writing in the baby boom, but such an easy frame would miss the more universal point ... Indiana’s views penetrate so far beyond the usual pabulum that it requires a bit of moral courage to read them, and a dark sense of humor would also help ... Whether Indiana’s voice is disturbing or hilarious depends largely on the reader’s relationship to sarcasm. Either way, Fire Season immortalizes a peerless voice, one that describes a falling floor that may never find its bottom.
Krow brings...practical empathy and eye for the odd to her debut novel, Fire Season, a picaresque story of three schemers whose paths cross in 19th-century Spokane just as the Washington Territory is striving for statehood ... Krow places microvignettes—miniature tales of magic, trickery and deception—in and around the novel's main action. She plays fast and loose with the tropes of the frontier novel.
The prose is incantatory ... The characters weigh their options, internally and in dialogue...but seem to care very little about outcomes. Outcomes, the reader gathers, aren’t really the point ... A novel that makes peace with uncertainty.
