November | 2024 | Coot's Reviews

book cover

Swiftly and violently as a gunshot a scream pierces the sloped fields lying open and fallow behind the house. Sounding like a woman being murdered in the way he has seen it on television where her agony is drawn out over several breathless and voyeuristic minutes until he changes the channel. Yet he knows it is not a woman but some unnamable beast of the forest come to bewitch and maim. A mother despondent, in all her devastated keening—the fox whose children now reside in the stomachs of the hounds at Stag’s Crossing has finally returned.

The difference between wolves and foxes his father says is that wolves love to hunt and foxes love to play. A tantalizing trail of blood in the half-melted snow. Wolves only have enough foresight to kill and upon their killing they will feed ravenously and strip the bones. But foxes; they are quick-witted and brutal. When they hunt they do so with finesse stalking and pouncing then snapping the spine in their slender jaws.

What goes around comes around.

Life’s a bitch and then you die.

Carlyle Morrow is bitter widower, his third son, Christopher, buried on his land, along with his mother, who died in the attempt to birth him. Morrow is left on his thousand acres in the middle of Nebraska with two sons. Joshua is the golden boy, beautiful, attentive to Carlyle’s every wish, a loyal favorite lapdog. Nick is the second son, plain in appearance, tepid in his embrace of his father’s violent nature. He possesses a bit of his mother’s second sight, his orientation less than that of a purebred. They have both been made to endure a legacy of cruelty passed down from father to son over at least three generations. Carlyle forces him into an act, while hunting, that goes beyond wrongfulness, beyond sin, into the realm of abomination. Nick will live with the guilt the rest of his life, even though the responsibility was not all his. Now in their forties, Nick and Josh have been separated from their father for decades. (Nick still calls) But neither can refuse the summons to return home on news that their father is preparing to die.

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Kailee Pederson – image from her Twitter profile

We follow Nick as he recalls his life, his struggles with Joshua and Carlyle, mostly the latter. He always found his brother’s wife, Emilia, fascinating, alluring in the mode of a siren. Carlyle is cruel, requiring complete obedience. He expects his sons to love the raw violence that marks his life. He does not raise his boys so much as train them. He even wishes that they could be as faithful and bloodthirsty as his best friends.

If Carlyle could have had dogs for sons he would have been a happy man; but when has a Morrow man ever been happy?

The structure of the novel is a back and forth, with alternating chapters, Then and Now. We learn how the boys’ treatment (Nick’s mostly) brings them to become the men they are in their forties. One would think that with chapters labeled so, there would be a clear differentiation between the internal timelines of each chapter. But no, there are transgressions within, as “Now” chapters, as well as “Then” chapters include lookbacks. Seems not cricket to me, but no biggie. The personal history is clearly a roadmap to the boys’ doom, which is referenced many times, so will not come as a shock. Pederson keeps offering glimpses of the future, a bell being rung louder and louder with each recurrence. There is an unrelenting atmosphere of dread. Awful things will be happening, although we are not let in on the specifics. For example, an early omen.

No thousand acres, no grand inheritance can ever be enough to postpone their destinies. Nick will die as bitter as he came into the world. He knows this just as well at thirteen as he will in thirty years.

Carlyle’s cruelty and monstrous control pushed them both away, Nick to New York, and a career as a cruel literary reviewer, Josh to the other coast with his wife, Emilia, whom Carlyle would not even allow into the house because of her Asian descent.

Yet in only ten years his children will betray him in their own inimitable ways—Joshua marrying out, Nick exiling himself to a foreign land. And in their absence Stag’s Crossing will lie silent and fallow as the fields surrounding it. This place: no place for young men.

or old men, for that matter. This tale displays the violence of a Cormac McCarthy tale. It is not for anyone with an aversion to scenes of death, particularly the death of animals. It comes as no surprise that

Cormac McCarthy is an all-time favorite writer for me, perhaps my favorite of favorites, and his influence is very obvious here.. – from the JamReads interview

References to animals are legion, not in a happy way, for the most part. It is clear that the Morrows fit in well. A sample:

Would he kneel before his father’s magnificence and eat oats from his hand like a wayward steer?
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Now he and Joshua must return to Stag’s Crossing. Return to that grand two-story house where as children they were left alone for hours at a time savaging each other like wild dogs.
————————————–
Finally, she turned to him. Only the slightest tilt of her neck, elegant as a swan’s.
————————————–
Upon awakening she is languorous as a cat sunning itself in a windowsill.
————————————–
Joshua sees him lying down next to him perfectly still. Breathing through his nose softly like a newborn foal.

There are only a gazillion more of these.

Pederson is masterful with sustaining tension. The reminders of doom help, but there is much more going on here. The tragedy felt very Shakespearean. (Titus Andronicus maybe? King Lear with competing sons instead of daughters?) People make choices, and suffer the results. The language is rich and diverse, from terse Cormac-McCarthy-esque declaratives to languid poetical passages.

Pederson uses much of her background to inform her tale. She was adopted by a Nebraska family, is of Asian descent and uses her experience as a gay kid coming of age to inform her portrayal of Nick’s growing sexual awareness and exploits. She weaves a Chinese myth into the story, providing some early breadcrumbs to lay a foundation for the horror to come. It does.

Given that the characters are so damaged, and so damaging, it can be tough to work up a lot of sympathy for them, even Nick, who carries forward into his writing the cruelty he was bred to in Nebraska. Carlyle is pretty much a pure monster, and Joshua is given much less coverage that the rest of his family. Emilia is mysterious and alluring whenever we see her, which is mostly at the back end.

This is Kaileen Pederson’s first novel It is an impressive debut, a smartly literary horror story. We cannot get enough of these.

Much of the novel’s setting of Stag’s Crossing, the thousand-acre farm owned by the Morrow family, is directly based on my family’s farm in Nebraska. I always found the woods that surround our farm to be a very contemplative, mystical, and mysterious place. I knew I wanted to draw on my Chinese background for Sacrificial Animals, so I started to think about different aspects of Chinese mythology that could be a good fit for this setting. Without giving anything away, I will just say the natural world plays a huge role in the mythological elements of the novel, and foxes — as featured on the cover — are one of my favorite animals.

Review posted – 11/15/24

Publication date – 8/20/24

I received an ARE of Sacrificial Animals from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Pederson’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Profile – from Macmillan

Kailee Pedersen writes haunted, unsettling speculative fiction. She graduated with a B.A. in Classics from Columbia University, specializing in ancient Greek. Kailee was adopted from Nanning in 1996 and grew up in Nebraska, where her family owns a farm. Her writing on LGBTQ+ and Asian American themes was awarded an Artist Fellowship by the Nebraska Arts Council in 2015. When not scribbling down her next book, you can catch her singing opera, playing video games, or working as a software engineer in New York City. Sacrificial Animals is her first novel.

Interviews
—–B&N Reads – Poured Over: Kailee Pedersen on Sacrificial Animals By Jenna Seery / August 20, 2024 – audio
Sound quality is bad, Kailee is tough to understand.
—–JamReads – Some Thoughts with … Kailee Pedersen – by Jamedi

Items of Interest from the author
—–American Foreign Service Association – 2012 – Burmese Days: Democratization and the U.S. – Burma Relationship
—– KAILEE PEDERSEN: IN PRAISE OF THE DIFFICULT WOMEN OF EAST ASIAN LITERATURE

At the base level it’s fear. It’s all about fear. People ask, ‘What are you afraid of?’ and that is not an answerable question. Any time I name a source for my fear I feel it as a deflection. I mean, sure, I can get close. You know, as in: I’m afraid of people because someone I trusted fucked with me when I was a child. I was traumatized, yes, and the fear probably began there, I guess. But I don’t really know because it seems, now, somehow elemental. It embodies some ancient, sleeping doom, and the only escape is self-destruction. You know? Like, if I become my own doom I’ve taken that power away from anything else. It’s preemptive. At least there’s agency in it.”
She felt the laughter spill out of her in a rush. Its piercing volume was at odds with the moment and the release it brought. Leo looked at her dumbfounded.
“Get the fuck out of my head, man,” Celia said.

He had merely done what men had been doing since the primeval birth of jealousy. Just a spoon of love from my forty-five, save you from another man. Howlin’ Wolf was just singing about what thousands had wished they could do, and probably had done, before there were cops and laws and all the rest of the arbitrary bullshit. And it had felt good, hadn’t it?

Daniel is 68, living a quiet life in a Hollywood Hills guest house when a visitor repeatedly appears. Dean is six years old and clearly in need of companionship. He lives with his grandfather, Jack, on the larger house on the property. Jack is not always particularly attentive. And Mom, Celia, is a rising young actress who is often away on prolonged shoots. Daniel is happy for the company.

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Max Ludington – image from Macmillan – shot by Jennifer Silverman

The novel braids the stories of Jack, Daniel and Celia, mostly Jack and Daniel. The story takes place in multiple times, today being 2017, and the backstory stepping up from 1968 to the seventies, to 1980, and 1988. Celia is not a part of the earlier events.

The sixties events cast a light on a turbulent time, touching on many of the aspects one might expect, young love, drug-dealing, acid trips, communes, San Francisco, wth a very dodgy cult among them. But despite the surface level, there is also consideration of the sort of existential, philosophical searching that was, for many, an important part of those times.

Young Daniel (1960s) makes a youthful mistake and suffers a grievous wrong, which follows him all his life. In the 1970s he finds solace in the desert, constructing a significant work of art, the Thorn Tree of the title. It gets him some notice, gives him a way to express what is inside him, and leads to some stability in his life.

Celia did an image search for the sculpture, and there it was, standing next to the modern art museum, taller than the building itself. It was huge, with thick, meandering branches and bristling snakelike twigs. Most of the branches, while not attempting verisimilitude, were formed with inherently natural shapes and gnarled twists, but here and there some were deliberately hewn into shapes that could never have occurred in nature: curving double on themselves and then back again to form tight willowy S-shapes, or turning straight downward at acute angles for a foot or two before continuing up and outward, as if infused genetically with lightning.

Jack is a very different sort. A predator, a sociopath or something like it, Jack wants what he wants and is not much concerned about who he damages to get it. He is routinely unkind, and worse, but he is also a seeker of truth, becoming connected with a cult and seriously mulling the writings on which the cult bases its outlook, even if the tenets of that group serve to bolster his own self-justification.

Daniel and Jack are linked through these years, the source of that link being one of the mysteries of the book. Jack is definitely a dark force. Daniel exists on a brighter side, despite having made some bad choices. He is a character who grows. But while Jack grows in a way, his widened view of reality is ultimately redirected to his narcissism. Not much is really done with Celia.

There is some lyrical writing which gives the story texture, depth to the two main characters, which makes it engaging, and a look at the times, both 60s and 70s, which gives it some substance. In addition it considers repercussions throughout one’s lives of actions taken in our youth.

Daniel stood for a moment at the threshold of the branches and looked up. The wind was made louder here in contact with the tree. The gravel path went around the south side, and he followed it to where it ended at an overlook. There was a plaque on a post, but he didn’t read it. Instead of standing at the overlook and staring out to sea, as the landscape designer had intended, he turned and went in under the branches, and immediately the world of the tree took over. He was surprised—he’d thought his memory of it was hopelessly colored by LSD and shock and time, that he had probably falsely mythologized every aspect of it and it would be just a place, with soil and roots and air but not the indwelling spirit he’d imbued it with in his mind. But it was as it had been—the wind quieting and the light clarifying, damping the sun into deep greenness—inhabited by a sense of protection and safety unchanged by the years of foot traffic and human attention.

There are many more of this sort. The voice is omniscient narrator, which presents way too many opportunities to tell rather than show. But I doubt this will bother most readers. Some characters come and go, seeming to be throw-aways. It is one of the things that make the book feel over-long. I kept hoping that some of these might be given a deeper look, with Jack getting less.

The alternating timelines, a fairly typical literary device, made sense to me. The Grateful Dead offer a link between now and then. There seemed some interest in other literary devices. For example, a boy appears to have a magical relationship with birds, but the image drops after partial usage.

Thorn Tree is an interesting read, offering some substance, interesting characters, and a strong core mystery. But for a book that is not overlong, at about four hundred pages, it felt like a much longer read because of the excess attention paid to Jack, and some tangential tales. The descriptive writing (I am a sucker for that) gives one a reason to push through, however prickly the passage.

Review posted – 11/01/24

Publication date – 4/15/24

I received an ARE of Thorn Tree from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Ludington’s personal, Goodreads, and Twitter pages

Profile – from Macmillan

MAX LUDINGTON’s first novel, Tiger in a Trance, was a New York Times Notable book, and his fiction has appeared in Tin House, Meridian, HOW Journal, Outerbridge, and On the Rocks: the KGB Bar Fiction Reader. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute.

Interview
—–The Palisades Newsletter – Max Ludington Reflects on His Second Novel, THORN TREE

Song
—–The Doors – Five To One
—–The Grateful Dead – The Very Best of the Grateful Dead