SALVATION

After murdering his childhood friend Rust Hawkins, Tom Horak hides out in a cabin in the Colorado Rockies, revisiting his painful past and awaiting his inevitable capture.

Life has been a series of cruelties for Tom. His drunken father subjected him to mental and physical abuse; his mother died slowly from cancer; his free-spirited girlfriend, Rose, took up with Rust, married him, and, following a tryst with Tom, had a baby, Gus. The fierce winter passes slowly in the cabin, where the unrepentant killer subsists on moose meat and bad memories. "Even in the daylight, sun obscured by thick clouds and snowfall, Tom saw only darkness." His life’s one pleasure, doting on Gus—to Rust’s great irritation—is gone. The boy, abandoned by his mother long before Rust’s death, is taken in by the faith-torn Lutheran pastor Morris Green. Retiring cop Marshal Thomlison, whose work is mostly tossing drunks in jail, unhappily goes after Tom. In different ways, all of the characters struggle with unanswerable questions concerning belief, family, community, and violence. So powerful is the language and reflection in this, Coloradan Langsfeld’s first novel, that the plot is secondary. Here are people who “decided to force themselves through the motions of things no longer felt in the heart.” The sounds of Tom’s isolation—“the cree-cree of his boots in the hard snow,” “the muffled skitter of powdered [moth] wings struggling against cloth and heat”—speak louder than his inner thoughts. Steeped in existential despair, this stripped-down novel at its best rises to the level of roots masters Michael Farris Smith, Tom Franklin, and Brian Panowich—great company for a writer who will only get better.

A haunting fait accompli captured by a strong new voice in Western noir.