Beautifully written, wonderful, naturalistic novel, with the structure of a mystery. A quiet, poetic crime story with original, interesting characters. Reminds me of Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, Alfred Hitchcock and Annie Proux.
Alfred Hitchcock once said “Mystery is when you don’t know what’s going to happen, but suspense is when you know what’s going to happen but you can’t stop watching anyway.” Allen Morris Jones starts off his excellent novel, A Bloom of Bones, with a scene that gives the reader a strong indication of what’s going to happen, but the writing is so strong throughout this novel that it absolutely keeps you on the edge of your chair anyway, wondering how we’re going to get to that strange, poignant opening event. Although the storyline of Bloom of Bones is wrapped around an unlikely love story, between a Montana poet named Eli Singer and his New York agent, Chloe, the real focus of the story points like a bullet toward that early incident in Eli’s life, an event that has shaped his life, and eventually tamps their love affair into a dark hole. Jones’ prose is a wonderful combination of stoic cowboy and sophisticated literati, a balance that is hard to achieve, much less maintain with such graceful transitions. But best of all, Jones manages to point us toward that thing that we already know about throughout this book, without ever making it seem as if it’s going to be disappointing when we finally get there. And as to whether that thing we think we know is true, I’ll let you find that out for yourself.
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