In the Loyal Mountains [Hardcover]

Rick Bass (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 20, 1995

Rick Bass's recent trio of novellas, Platte River, was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "a major step in [his] climb to the top echelon of American fiction writers." Now, with this dazzling new collection, Bass establishes himself as a master of the short story. These tales embrace vibrant images of human life and exuberant explorations of the natural world. In the title story, a man remembers his youth in the Texas hill country when he participated in his uncle's raucous escapades, which have taken new shape and meaning by what has happened since. Although his work is grounded in reality, Bass's stories acquire fantastic proportions: enormous pigs charge through the streets and root beneath houses; a narrator meets a woman who runs up and down mountains; two wild boys converge deep in the woods to joust. Each of these ten stories is a mythical narrative celebrating the tentative, moving relationship between people and their environment.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Long awaited and highly anticipated by the fans of his previous short-story collection The Watch, Rick Bass returns to the genre with the gifted hand of a master. With a unique, longing voice and a lyrical pen, Bass's tales simultaneously embrace vibrant images of ordinary human life and exuberant images of the natural world. His vision of man's relationship to his environment is uncompromising, edging towards anger and settling into a profound understanding. This collection will stand among the best of the year.

From Publishers Weekly

In this moving and self-assured collection of 10 stories (some of them linked, others not), Bass (Platte River) captures two very different regions of the country. A handful of the selections are set in an isolated Montana valley, a place inhabited by cougars and bears and the occasional pedestrian who gets pulled off the road and mauled. Others are set in the deep South, including "The Legend of Pig-Eye," in which a Mississippi boxer recounts the bizarre training rituals of his instructor, which include outswimming a crazed horse named Killer. All of the stories are told in the first person, and all the narrators are men. Often looking back at important moments in their lives, they never waver in their love for their environments: "I wake up smiling sometimes because I have all my days left to live in this place," says the unnamed narrator of "The Valley." For that love, the men often pay a price measured in human isolation, but they pay it willingly. The protagonist of "Swamp Boy" speaks for most of Bass's men when he says: "My heart was wild and did not belong among people." Between the opening story, "The History of Rodney" (a Southern-gothic tale about the denizens of a pig-infested Mississippi ghost town), and the close of the title story (a nostalgic riff on Texas, suicide and golf) Bass achieves a solid thematic cohesion and an irrational sort of communion among the stories that give this collection something like the heft of a wonderfully layered novel.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 168 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 1st edition (June 20, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039571687X
• ISBN-13: 978-0395716878
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,281,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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