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Set in 1982, Tom’s Crossing takes place in a small Utah county and the mountain ranges surrounding it. Kalin March, the 15-year-old protagonist and new resident in town, promises his dying friend that he will save two horses from slaughter. The friend, Tom Gatestone, accompanies Kalin from beyond the grave as a ghost.<\/p>\n
Tom’s Crossing is beautifully written in a distinct style that feels like listening to a very clever friend tell ghost stories by a campfire.<\/p>\n
If you’ve read Danielewski’s House of Leaves, The Familiar, or one of his other works, you may expect to see a wide array of fonts, inverted text, random pictures, academic citations, and other formatting oddities. But you actually won’t find any of those quirks here.<\/p>\n
Tom’s Crossing is structured and presented like a conventional novel, one paragraph after another–though Danielewski does italicize dialogue instead of quotes. Traditional formatting means you won’t find large swaths of white space, so Tom’s Crossing is by far <\/em>his longest novel by word count. But if you aren’t scared away by the staggering page count, I think you’ll find Tom’s Crossing to be Danielewski’s most approachable work of fiction. I eclipsed the halfway mark this week and am thoroughly enjoying it.<\/p>\n But if you don’t want to take this Steven’s word for it; the lone blurb on the back of the dust jacket is from Stephen King:<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an amazing work of fiction. I absolutely loved it. At the heart you\u2019ll find a blood-drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children. But there\u2019s so much more. I immersed myself. Have never read anything like it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n