Country Dark

Country Dark is the first fiction Offutt, who in his youth was compared to Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, has published in twenty years, and it shows. Not because it's an encyclopedic novel packed with two decades of material, but the opposite: it's a tale that has been pared back by a master to only the most necessary and vivid words and moments. Beginning when Tucker returns, still young, from the Korean War to his home in the hollers of Kentucky, he finds his life overturned again and again by love and by threat and by his own often violent decisiveness. Call it "country noir" if you like; I call it a thrilling, thoughtful page-turner and one of the best books I've read this year.