Set in 1982, Tom’s Crossing takes place in a small Utah county and its surrounding mountain ranges. Klein March, the 15-year-old protagonist and new resident of the town, promises his dying friend that he will save two horses from slaughter. The friend, Tom Gatestone, is like a ghost out of the grave with Klein.
Tom’s Crossing is beautifully written in a distinct style that feels like a very clever friend telling ghost stories by the campfire.
If you’ve read Danielewski’s Addresses, Acquaintances, or one of his other works, you can expect to see lots of fonts, inverted text, random images, academic references, and other formatting oddities. But in reality you won’t find any of these rates here.
Tom’s Crossing is structured and presented like a traditional novel, one paragraph after another—although Danielowski doesn’t make dialogue rather than quotes. Traditional formatting means you won’t get a lot of white space, so Tom’s Crossing is by away Her longest novel by word count. But if you’re not afraid of a staggering page count, I think you’ll find Tom’s Crossing to be Danielowski’s greatest work of fiction. I eclipsed the half 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 get the chase and the blood-soaked story of two brave and resourceful kids. But there’s so much more to it. I was immersed. I’ve never read anything like it.”
