Customer Reviews

When We Were Wolves: Stories

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jon Billman writes in vivid color. He has just enough detail to keep my eyes on the page, but not so much that I can't daydream my self into some reflective thought and ponder what it is that the story invokes for me. I especially like the sense I get of his voice in the telling; good story tellers have this gift of the double personal. Theirs and ours. Billman has a knack for writing about women without making us mere backstory; his character "Ash" is the best! If this is his first book, I look forward to the next.

Billman's stories are very vivid, exciting, and fresh. I read this book with great interest and enjoyment and I can't wait to see more! I can understand why John Keeble and Annie Proulx are so excited about this man's writing.

Jon Billman's collection of stories is a joy to read, and it resonates with an authenticity that makes a reader want to believe it all. Billman's characters are marginal and marginalized, caught in a range war between the the herd-fear of conformity and a place that demands robust individuality. People molded by their surroundings, both geographic and spiritual. As a Wyoming writer, I found its tone pitch-perfect. Recommended.

I WAS GIVEN THE BOOK AS A GIFT AND I HIGHLY PRAISE THE STORIES AND THE WRITING STYLE. I AM A BIG FAN OF SHORT STORIES AND JON BILLMAN WILL BE HEARD FROM AGAIN.

"In Goya's greatest scenes," wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "we seem to see/the people of the world/exactly at the moment when/they first attained the title of/'suffering humanity.'" In Jon Billman's stories, we find them much later -- trapped, yes, and skating on thin ice, but disillusioned in the best sense, they defy their suffering with a shoulder shrug, a fierce body check, and a line cast prayerfully into the nearest pond. In these stories, we don't find any of those larger-than-life heroes who make readers feel bad about themselves. What kind of heroism is possible in a wild, wild west that has degenerated into a turn-of-the-millenium high-desert wasteland where "the computer had the final word"? In Jon Billman's west, heroism means tanking a baseball game, believing it will bring rain to a drought-ravaged community. It means awakening a sense of the sublime in one's neighbors by spraypainting a naked woman on a water tower. Here, a man sometimes has no recourse but to spray insecticides above the home of the woman who never quite loved him back. Here, a man, if he wants to really be a man, must also be a wild animal, willing to attach a dog sled to his back and run yowling through snow and rabbitbrush. Hams Fork, Wyoming joins Yaknapatawpha County, Winesburg, Ohio, and Raymond Roussel's Africa on the itenary of all who are intent on traveling through what Keats called "realms of gold."

Since Jon's early years -- from coloring Santa Claus with a black beard on a plastic dinner plate to claiming in 1980 that "cassette tapes won't last, 8-tracks will be around forever" -- my brother has never really had his finger planted firmly on the pulse of Americana. Luckily, When We Were Wolves shows that he finally got his act together. I can't wait to read what he does next.

Good stuff, bro.

I once saw Jon Billman eat a garlic pancake. I remained his friend despite this, and he has here turned in a great collection of stories about Wyoming and environs. Before I read this book, I thought all western writing had saloons, spurs, buckin' broncs, hats measured by fluid capacity, and sagebrush or tumbleweeds or other non-leafy plant things. Jon's book has all of those, but it also has uranium prospecting, mural painting, prison hockey, firefighting, and several mentions of George Armstrong Custer. If you like these things, get this book and read it. There is also garlic.

I'm giving him four stars because it's his first effort and I wasn't able to finish the book because it was an interlibrary loan.
Let me tell you about Billman. I love how he captures dying out or faded americana, the bucking-bronco show that attracts all kind of miscreants, the small town entrepreneur with dubious methods, the prohibition-style scenario involving Mormons and mead. The last scenario and situation-comedy in general is Billman's forte.
What I liked most about Billman is that he has an immense potential to be an extremely funny writer. The first story I read from Billman was "Inkneck" from Ploughshares. This is his funniest story and I highly recommend it. It has added bonuses if your a Cormac McCarthy fan. Keep your eye on him.

I loved this wonderful collection of short stories, all of them set in the rural West and mostly in Wyoming. It is a comic world where men are men and, consequently, the women have a monopoly on intelligence. These guys hunt, they fish, they drink beer, and remain faithful to an adolescent desregard for law and order, taking delight in irritating their conventional, godfearing neighbors and giving themselves to amusements like Little Bighorn reenactments.

My favorite is the title story about an ice hocky team from the state pen, who love the fierce brutality of the sport more than scoring. Close seconds are a series of stories about two buddies in Hams Fork (a fictional stand-in for the author's home, Kemmerer), Wyoming. One is a vaguely disgruntled history teacher and the other a painter, who decorates the town water tower one night and, immobilized by a ruptured disk while playing golf, has a close encounter with hypothermia.

Most of the women involved with the men in these well written stories make only brief appearances, because they're either long-suffering or in possession of the good sense to move on. Also recommended: Dave Hickey's "Prior Convictions," William Hauptman's "Good Rockin' Tonight," and of course Annie Proulx' "Close Range" and "Bad Dirt."

Jon Billman has an idea of what the true west is. Not what some other writers or travelers fictionalize it to be. Billman has a sense and understanding of what Wyoming locals and natives are really like. Not the trust fund baby, North Face wearing pot heads that are colonizing the west. (Formerly of Pinedale, WY)