Auker's THE STORY IS THE THING and Brooks' PAINTED HORSES
According to the inside flap of Malcolm Brooks’ debut novel Painted Horses , in the mid-1950s America was flush with prosperity and the West was still very much wild. Like Painted Horses , I was born in the 1950s, a child of both prosperity and wildness. I learned how to toddle my way down mountain trails used by deer and elk about the same time I learned which fork to use for shrimp cocktail. I learned how to trust our paint horse Bingo as he high-stepped over rocks and around fallen branches. Then we moved and I learned what it meant to say goodbye. Life, I discovered, was not going to be a linear journey. Nor is the journey you will take while reading Painted Horses ( Grove Atlantic , NY, 2014). The opening drops you smack dab in the middle of backstory that unfolds in real time—the smell of the ancient muck of an archaeological dig in London rises up from the page even as the female protagonist sinks her toes into the mire. In a deft literary turn to the West, we find h