Happy days in Wyoming

In the wake of a presidential election where both candidates’ fervid speech- ifying took them back and forth across the good-ol’-boy American heartlands, the rugged swathe of territory that plays host to the characters in Mark Spragg’s finely crafted novel seems almost as familiar as my own reflection.

For the purposes of this quintessentially Great American Dream Fable, the reader finds himself transplanted straight back into the centre of that extensive splodge of gun-toting Republican red which dominated the TV pundits’ psephological maps, a remarkably beautiful backdrop for a novel centred around Yellowstone National Park, crowned by the ‘black and jagged’...