DEER SEASON, debut novel from seasoned short-fictioneer runs Life through her paces

DEER SEASON
ERIN FLANAGAN
University of Nebraska Press/Flyover Fiction
$21.95 all editions, available today

#University Press Week celebration! For the rest of the year, until 12/31/23, University of Nebraska Press's entire catalog is available for 50% OFF. Enter coupon code 6HLW23.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s the opening weekend of deer season in Gunthrum, Nebraska, in 1985, and Alma Costagan’s intellectually disabled farmhand, Hal Bullard, has gone hunting with some of the locals, leaving her in a huff. That same weekend, a teenage girl goes missing, and Hal returns with a flimsy story about the blood in his truck and a dent near the headlight. When the situation escalates from that of a missing girl to something more sinister, Alma and her husband are forced to confront what Hal might be capable of, as rumors fly and townspeople see Hal’s violent past in a new light.

A drama about the complicated relationships connecting the residents of a small-town farming community, Deer Season explores troubling questions about how far people will go to safeguard the ones they love and what it means to be a family.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Have you looked at the cover image of this book? Go on, get your nose up to the screen...now did you notice the shape of that "D" in "Deer"? There's a clue in it.

Author Flanagan, no stranger to the "Flyover Fiction" series with two story collections in it, here gives us her first novel. It's set thirty-five years ago in a rural place that, in our own time, has doubtless vanished entirely. Farming being the corporate endeavor it is now. This time, the one we're inhabiting in this novel, feels like something from a Russian novel with peasants and kulaks and tsars in their palaces so far above us. Actually, it's just families farming land they'd inherited and living lives they don't feel embarrassed by.

The major event of the novel is the disappearance of teenaged minx Peggy Ahern. The rampant drinking culture of the area and era was the source of the problem...Peggy, too smart and too young to control it yet, was in the habit of sneaking out on weekends to partake of the big, wild world of the after-hours partying at Castle Farm. You know, as practice for when she'd be off at college.

But one fine night...the one before her little brother's going to be confirmed in the Lutheran Church, no less...she doesn't come home to have her hangover in her bed. And days go by. She doesn't come home; she isn't Found; and the town decides that Hal Did Something. Hal, big and nice-looking but sadly with an intellectual incapacity, has about an eleven-year-old's scope to understand the world. And an adult man's body, and an adult man's needs; without the wherewithal to get context of Peggy's flirting, or realize when he was going too far in responding to her. As he does for the first time at a town picnic. In front of everyone, including Peggy's drunk father.

But Alma and Clyle step in, as usual. They are his de facto parents and they, as has been their habit for a decade or more, disentangle him from the worst of the consequences. They took him on when he was still in high school, and really into their family, partially because they could never have kids. They're in their late fifties, so a twenty-eight-year-old man-child is the right age and, though Alma would bristle at the idea, his absence of adulthood soothes an ache left from desiring motherhood and not being given it.

Now, though...now the town that Clyle isn't much inclined to leave but Alma genuinely despises is in formation against Hal, their only family, their changeling chick, and despite their staunch stance in support of him they begin to wonder. After all...temper and strength of a man...no functioning social sense...pretty girl he fell for when she flirted with him....

There's a long, slow road to follow, like driving on the noisy gravel roads of the area, to get to the deeply saddening and utterly infuriating resolution to the plot. But you already know: Hal will never, ever be free of the stain of Being A Suspect. Rightly or wrongly accused, accused is enough. In the end, the resolution to the disappearance is...curiously irrelevant. Secrets get unburied in hearts that just don't open that easily. Words are said, the kind that never heal, the kind that have to lacerate for the pain to find a way out. But the world changes every day, and how many times do we get to look that change in the eyes as it comes at us? To decide, yes I will do this or no I can't be that any more. To use the horror of a life-altering misery for good; to sluice the life-long wretchedness of old and dirty hurts out.

Those moments are, and I expect all y'all know it, rare, and horrible, and greatly to be treasured.

What Author Flanagan does with this story is to make the inevitable a damn sight more high-stakes for everyone than it usually is in real life. Milo, the preteen brother, is the one who quietly and completely revamps his life. Alma and Clyle are old, but there's no need to die before you lie down! Their souls, despite never getting what they wanted, still yearn...so the world after the crisis is resolved (and the resolution made me so goddamned mad I screamed at the book) takes a deeply familiar form.

It's a funny old thing, fiction, it lets us work through our bitterest disappointments safely. It doesn't promise it'll be fun. In the case of this novel, the satisfaction of the plot's resolution is mostly schadenfreude. I know some people think there's a Sanctity about Motherhood, but I am decidedly not among them. I don't think Author Flanagan is, either. This is her third book, though first novel, all in the "Flyover Fiction" series. Her two story collections, 2013's It's Not Going to Kill You, and Other Stories, and 2005's The Usual Mistakes, all have mothers without maternal credibility in them.

I can't give the book all five stars because there are so many w-bombs dropped that I've got sleaze-shrapnel in every single one of my eyes. I don't enjoy stories with as much helplessness as this one made me feel...the fact is that from the moment we learn Peggy's disappeared, we know there can't be a Happy Ending...but this story's not about the ending. It's about the ways and means of putting a life together when you don't have a single solitary scrap of hope. It's about loving someone enough to be sure they have dinner when you'd like to brain them with a rock. It's about what happens when you can not even try one more time, then you get up and do the chores because they don't do themselves.

I would strongly encourage you to read it, to get your eyes into it. The way the world is today, we need this example of making the effort because there's work that needs doing inside, outside, betwixt and between. And Author Flanagan (her penchant for w-bombs aside) does this with assurance and in a style replete with the smallest pleasures of being in this world of the senses.