Old King

Starred review from April 22, 2024
Loskutoff’s powerful and suspenseful latest (after Come West and See) follows a heartbroken man who makes a fresh start in 1976 Montana, where he becomes neighbors with Ted Kaczynski, who will later be unmasked as the Unabomber. Following a divorce, Duane leaves Salt Lake City for the tiny town of Lincoln, Mont., where mining and logging companies clash with radical environmentalists. Six years later, Duane’s troubled teenage son, Hudson, visits him for the summer to help build a log cabin. Duane’s cabin is adjacent to the reclusive Ted’s tar-paper shack, and Ted initially bonds with Hudson over their anger at the world. The friendship crumbles after Hudson takes up dirt-biking with some kids from the area—the bikes’ buzz-saw motors and turf-wrecking treads draw Ted’s ire and trigger his debilitating headaches. The author animates Ted’s intertwined feelings of superiority and grievance, which are partly a reaction against his unfeeling parents and a harmful psychology experiment he was subjected to as a 16-year-old Harvard student. Suspense mounts as Ted constructs mail bombs, poisons another neighbor’s dogs, and commits other acts of mayhem. Loskutoff’s narrative is swiftly paced and deeply textured, with a keen sense of the landscape and its cantankerous human inhabitants. This leaves a mark.

May 1, 2024
Loskutoff tells the story of a violent radical living within a rural community. For the decades that he sent bombs around the country, Ted Kaczynski lived in a small Montana town. This novel uses that piece of history as a starting point, focusing largely on the Unabomber's neighbors over the course of several years as they go about their business, unaware that their reclusive neighbor is leaving a trail of violence and death across the nation. Loskutoff opts to tell this story as an ensemble piece, beginning with a man named Duane Oshun, who drives to Montana in the wake of his marriage falling apart and eventually encounters a tattooed pastor named Kim Younger. Duane settles there, finding work as a logger and meeting some of the other townspeople, including Hutch, who keeps wounded animals, including a bear, on his property. The most interesting parts of the novel focus on its more morally conflicted characters, including Duane and a Forest Service agent, Mason, who struggle with the transformation of the region and their own place in it. The work of the Wilderness Society and anti-logging activists looms in the background of much of the novel's action. As for Kaczynski, he's portrayed unsympathetically throughout the novel--a man who poisons his neighbor's dogs and dreams about "cities on fire, dams bursting, and planes falling from the sky." Nep, the postal inspector who spends years tracking Kaczynski, is a far more compelling character--an agent whose inherent curiosity often leads his interviews into unexpected places. The details of small-town life and communion with the outdoors are neatly rendered, but this novel's real-life terrorist is its least interesting aspect. Which may be the point. A novel that's at its strongest when it's most philosophical and digressive.

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