Publishers Weekly
11/11/2024
Wink (August), who works as a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River, mines his extensive knowledge of the great outdoors in this transportive novel of two brothers living on the margins in the Beartooth mountains of Montana. Thad, 27, and Hazen, 26, are deep in debt from their late father’s hospital bills, and eke out an existence by logging, fishing, and bear poaching. Thad shoulders the burden of their survival, frequently overriding Hazen, who is simpleminded but extremely competent and instinctive in the wild. When a neighbor known as “the Scot,” who recently killed someone for breaking into his house, proposes an illegal scheme to remove shed antlers from the national park, Thad refuses, but the Scot manipulates Hazen, who has a soft spot for the Scot’s daughter, into defying his brother. Complicating matters is the arrival of their hippie mother, Sacajawea, who abandoned the family years earlier. While the narrative tension is inconsistent, Wink mesmerizes with his descriptions of nature and the men’s survival skills, and he successfully portrays the brothers’ humanity in their dance between struggling for dominance and wanting to support each other. Admirers of Thomas McGuane ought to seek this out. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Co. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
This taut, compelling novel explores the great outdoors—and a realm of moral uncertainty. . . . A ferociously gripping book.”—The Economist
“Any reader seeking a refreshing corrective to the soap opera version of the American West offered by Paramount’s TV hit Yellowstone would be well advised to pick up Callan Wink’s new novel, Beartooth . . . These action-filled passages are absorbing, elegantly written and sometimes thrilling . . . an original and impressive piece of work.”—New York Times Book Review
“An atmospheric and superbly executed drama . . . Thriller elements are present and skillfully realized in the narrative, but Wink proceeds far more interestingly, developing Beartooth into an expansive and convincing novel of family relationships. . . . Wink’s descriptions of nature are superbly precise and vivid, never anthropomorphizing the world and its non-human inhabitants. The western trope of the strong, self-reliant individual contending with a lyrically described environment and its gnarled human inhabitants, driven by violent impulses and private moral codes, is upturned by Wink’s close, convincing and unsentimental observations of people and nature. . . . This makes Beartooth an emotionally rich and compelling piece of storytelling.”—The Guardian
“Like [Scott Smith’s] A Simple Plan, Beartooth is a gripping, rural-set adventure novel in which brothers make a terrible decision that permanently alters their lives and their relationship to each other . . . Wink is a spare, exacting writer. It’s not until Beartooth reaches its raw conclusion that you realize there’s not a word out of place and that virtually all the events in the brothers’ doomed lives seem to have been forecast by the ominous first sentence.”—Minnesota Star Tribune
“In this transportive novel of two brothers living on the margins in the Beartooth mountains of Montana . . . Wink mesmerizes with his descriptions of nature and the men’s survival skills, and he successfully portrays the brothers’ humanity in their dance between struggling for dominance and wanting to support each other.”—Publishers Weekly
“Wink’s highly readable second novel . . . is at once thoroughly wild and thoroughly intimate. The modest poetry of Callan’s prose does justice both to the beauty of the wilderness and to the complexity of the brothers’ relationship.”—The New Statesman
“A novel of impeccable control and unflinching darkness. And then a glimmer of hope.”—Kirkus (starred review)
“A combination of talented writer and knowledgeable outdoorsman, Wink reminds me of Peter Heller. But A Simple Plan—Scott Smith’s ‘93 thriller-turned-‘98 movie—is the most obvious comparison here.”—Boston Globe
“Wink knows his setting inside out . . . Definitely a writer to stick with.”—Daily Mail
“A dual consciousness—of the sublime and exalted nature of the universe, and of its utter dispassion—flows through the novel.”—Irish Times
“Tense and gripping.”—The Gloss
“One of the best and fiercest heist stories since A Simple Plan . . . Beartooth is unstoppable, the literary treasure you’ve been looking for.”—Junot Diaz, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Callan Wink's Beartooth shows a Montana that is fueled by grit, vengeance, elbow grease, and desperation. Wink has a poet’s eye for the landscape, and his characters are as textured as the mountains they call home.”—Steven Rinella, author and host of The MeatEater Podcast
“I found something to love on every page of Beartooth, a moving and tightly drawn novel about two brothers trying to eke out a hardscrabble, sometimes illegal living on the edge of Yellowstone after their father dies. Callan Wink is a truly gifted writer.”—Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and The Heavenly Table
“Callan Wink’s Beartooth blew me away. Wink writes with an elegant precision that makes the weight of sadness on the heart as palpable as the weight of a past-due notice in his character’s hands. What begins as propulsively as a finely drawn thriller ultimately resolves itself into something much more profound than that, at times in contact with the ineffable itself. I read it in a single sitting, but I’ll be thinking about it for a long, long time to come.”—Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds
“Beartooth sank its teeth into me. I had a hard time closing the covers, getting out of my chair, because I was truly utterly transported to the logging roads and snow-melt rivers of Montana. Callan Wink treats nature as a holy altar and a widening mouth, and he writes a story that moves as fast as a bullet down a barrel. His characters and their troubles—especially the two misfit brothers at the heart of this novel—will live with me for a long time.”—Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon and The Comet Cycle
“Callan Wink's Beartooth evokes the breathtaking beauty of Yellowstone in its tense exploration of the complicated love and survival of two brothers.”—Shelf Awareness
“Wink, who is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River when he’s not writing beautifully told short stories and novels, is a master craftsman: his dialogue is pitch perfect, his characters breathtakingly real, and the setting so vividly described it that we can feel the mud seeping into our socks and hear the water from the hole in the ceiling plinking into the metal bowl on the floor. A remarkable, memorable novel.”—Booklist
“A narrative filled with tension and suspense . . . Through his eloquent yet gritty prose, Wink captures the stark beauty of Montana’s landscape and the raw, unfiltered emotions of his characters. . . . Beartooth is not a story of survival in the traditional sense but an exploration of what it means to truly live, to forgive and to find strength in the most unlikely of places. . . . A gripping tale of survival and redemption.”—Rocky Mountain Reader
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-11-09
Two brothers struggle with moral, legal, and physical challenges while living off the grid near Yellowstone.
The seasons and mountain wilderness are practically characters in this vividly rendered novel, while the human element is merely part of the landscape. Thad and his younger brother, Hazen, have been doing whatever they need to survive, living off the land. Their mother long ago abandoned the family, and now their father has died. They’re on their own, extending that family’s legacy: “Though they possessed no great strength, the men in their line had been shaped—by environment and circumstance—for tremendous acts of myopic endurance.” The brothers are even more myopic and perhaps not as strong, or at least not as fit for survival, as their capable, taciturn father had been. Their father also had a strong sense of right and wrong, and the brothers know they are falling short of that. At least Thad does. At 27, he’s a year older than Hazen, and he’s the more reflective one. Hazen is the impulsive one, less capable of functioning on his own, or so thinks Thad. Their lives have become more of a challenge than ever, as their father’s death left them in greater financial straits, and the roof of their rickety house is almost literally coming down on them. An evil, mysterious outsider—“the Scot”—offers a scheme to save the house, but it involves an illegal haul of elk antlers; hundreds of pounds worth. It appears the brothers are destined for disaster, but one of the surprises here is the way the novel’s elemental plot subverts expectations. “You don’t know anything,” the Scot tells Thad. “You don’t even know how much you don’t know.”
A novel of impeccable control and unflinching darkness. And then a glimmer of hope.
