Much as natural beauty can mask predator/prey violence, McLaughlin's lush descriptions of the native flora and fauna of Moore's mountain domain, the 'fecund riot of chest-high bluestem and orchard grass,' seductively create what could be a setting out of Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things ... An extraordinary first novel of powerful prose, Bearskin captures the blurry line between studying primordial nature and being a part of it.
...[an] exciting first novel ... Like a slow-motion cinematographer, McLaughlin skillfully breaks down the actions of hunter and hunted into their constituent parts ... Bearskin, then, may call for a little patience from the reader. But stick with the novel and you’ll be rewarded with some of the best action writing in recent fiction.
Atmosphere, as its opening so impeccably indicates, is everything in Bearskin. This is not exactly the page-turning thriller so overstuffed with twists it leaves you dizzy by page 100. It’s a slow-burn by design, a tale of suspense that reels you in through McLaughlin’s scrupulous skill. There’s no escaping the mountainous isolation enveloping Rice, and as the novel pushes forward and stakes a claim in richer psychological territory, there’s no escaping the man’s tortured mind, either ... Ostensibly a character study, Bearskin is most satisfying as a philosophical investigation of man and nature, washed in noir ... it’d be better off without its most familiar beats, its reverting to genre expectations. But when its imagery, so stark and often poetic, takes center stage, Bearskin is elegiac, hypnotic—unshakable.
Part thriller, part crime novel, part dreamscape, James A. McLaughlin’s Bearskin refuses to be contained ... Smart and sophisticated, with animals both wild and domestic acting as metaphors, Bearskin is a gritty, down-home tale told with brute force. Rice is a memorable, reluctant hero for both his community and the animals in his charge.
The landscape is rendered in remarkable prose that puts the reader right out on the trail with Moore in his ghillie suit, often lost in a Castaneda-like rapture that contrasts sharply with intermittent bursts of stunning brutality. C. J. Box and Paul Doiron fans will enjoy this edgy tale, with human greed and wildlife exploitation at its heart.
As taut as a crossbow and as sharp as an arrowhead, McLaughlin’s debut unfolds in the Appalachian wilderness of Virginia, a landscape whose heart of darkness pulses viscerally through its characters ... The novel’s denouement, a smoothly orchestrated confluence of the greater and lesser subplots, plays out against a tempest-tossed natural setting whose intrinsic beauty and roughness provide the perfect context for the story’s volatile events. This is a thrilling, thoroughly satisfying debut.
...a violent, compelling story that uses its milieu to incredible effect ... Told in spare prose and portraying the authentic mechanics of hunting, combat, and psychological defense, the novel dares the reader to root for this damaged antihero but convinces us that he’s worth it. An intense, visceral debut equal to the best that country noir has to offer.
