Two teenagers leave their small town on a vaguely charted road trip through the northern wilderness, with little more than canned food, second-hand camping gear, and the rifle they buy for reasons neither can articulate. The more they handle the gun, and the farther they get from their parents and peers, girlfriends and online gaming, the less their actions—and the games, literal and metaphorical, they play—are bound by the usual constraints. When one decides to harass a young couple they meet on the highway, the encounter leads them down a road from which there's no coming back.
Unsettling and powerful ... Precise, subtle ... The author, courageously, doesn’t try to make his protagonists enjoyable company; their banter is seldom playful, and the spare dialogue is delivered without quotation marks, rendering the numberless chapters and long paragraphs even more hushed ... Admirably resists a lurid climax befitting Patriot, instead offering an extended coda about a minor character alluded to early on.
Nell Zink is an idiosyncratic writer ... Delightfully surprising lines are frequent ... Zink’s narration is cool, her humour is dry and her dialogue is convincing. But the promise of her characters’ quirkiness doesn’t in the end add up to much. Despite its early intrigue, the story feels disappointingly quiet by the end.
Quietly frightening ... Inhabits both characters’ states of mind, at times mesmerizingly, depicting their braggadocio, their resentments and their paranoia ... The book’s unknowns conjure a deep disturbance in the condition of male friendship.
