Set in 1982, Tom’s Crossing takes place in a small Utah county and the mountain ranges surrounding it. Kalin March, the 15-year-old protagonist and new resident in town, promises his dying friend that he will save two horses from slaughter. The friend, Tom Gatestone, accompanies Kalin from beyond the grave as a ghost.
Tom’s Crossing is beautifully written in a distinct style that feels like listening to a very clever friend tell ghost stories by a campfire.
If you’ve read Danielewski’s House of Leaves, The Familiar, or one of his other works, you may expect to see a wide array of fonts, inverted text, random pictures, academic citations, and other formatting oddities. But you actually won’t find any of those quirks here.
Tom’s Crossing is structured and presented like a conventional novel, one paragraph after another–though Danielewski does italicize dialogue instead of quotes. Traditional formatting means you won’t find large swaths of white space, so Tom’s Crossing is by far his longest novel by word count. But if you aren’t scared away by the staggering page count, I think you’ll find Tom’s Crossing to be Danielewski’s most approachable work of fiction. I eclipsed the halfway mark this week and am thoroughly enjoying it.
But if you don’t want to take this Steven’s word for it; the lone blurb on the back of the dust jacket is from Stephen King:
“This is an amazing work of fiction. I absolutely loved it. At the heart you’ll find a blood-drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children. But there’s so much more. I immersed myself. Have never read anything like it.”
