Audacious, rambling ... This author has always reveled in bridging genre and high-gloss literature; here he blends police procedural, the horror of Stephen King and the postmodern density of David Foster Wallace ... This is peak maximalist fiction: a mash-up of famous, forgotten and half-forgotten volumes, a library of an author’s mind. Some readers may find Tom’s Crossing ponderous and bloated, with too many forks in the trail. I advise patience and fortitude: Danielewski’s affection for his characters leads the big ideas much as Tom guides Kalin and Landry higher into the mountains. The narrative beckons us to settle in. Its excesses drive its risks.
Sometimes as I was approaching the end...I had to put the book down for a while to walk in my neighborhood. At least once, I even cried in the newly cool fall air, worn down by the overwhelming bigness of Danielewski’s accomplishment. This is a book like a mountain, so mazed up with crags and canyons that you inevitably lose a little of yourself on the way to its summit ... Tremendous ... I loved this book. I imagine that almost everyone who reads it through will try to heave a copy into your hands. Let me be the first. Pick it up, and be patient with its loping rhythms until you find your own. Gallop or trot real slow.
A work of new mythology at its heart ... Danielewski, here, takes our own places, both mountains and mythos, and builds new worlds from it. It’s a tome of a book, arduous and impossibly thick in its characters and locations, that lives up to its intentions.
