Wow! eBook
Old King: A Novel
Author(s): Maxim Loskutoff (Author)
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
- Publication Date: October 21, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 304 pages
- ISBN-10: 1324110961
- ISBN-13: 9781324110965
Book Description
An NPR “Best Book of the Year”
“Eerily atmospheric, keep-you-up-late suspenseful.” ―Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle
In this haunting novel about the end of the frontier dream, a man tries to reinvent himself in one of America’s last wild territories, while his neighbor begins a crime spree that will tremble the nation.
In the summer of 1976, Duane Oshun finds himself stranded in a remote Montana town beset by a series of strange and menacing events. He takes a job as a logger and builds a cabin on an isolated road near a reclusive neighbor―a hermit named Ted Kaczynski.
The two men are captivated by the valley’s endangered old-growth forest, but Kaczynski’s violent grievances against modern society soon threaten the lives of all those around him. As Kaczynski’s bombs crescendo to the book’s devastating conclusion, Old King wrestles with the birth of the modern environmental movement, the accelerating dominion of technology in American life, and a new kind of violence that lives next door.
Told in four parts sweeping across two decades, Old King establishes Maxim Loskutoff as one of the most thrilling and inventive authors of the American west, a writer “endowed with fearless audacity, stunning grace, and gutsy heart” (Nickolas Butler).
Editorial Reviews
Review
― Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts
“[The] explosive climax…foreshadows a more dangerous, deadly America.”
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“A gripping story of love and compassion, the end of the counterculture movement, and the nihilism and violence that replaced it.”
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“Mr. Loskutoff is unmatched at evoking the contentious, transitional nature of the American West…a place of new and clashing mythologies.”
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“Deftly captures how the environment is both enchanting and fearsome.”
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“The evils of ever-encroaching technology and environmental degradation are admirably presented by Loskutoff not as the bugaboos of an unhinged crank, but as real-life conflicts in the ecotone of town and wild country.”
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“Powerful and suspenseful…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.”
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Old King is a compelling, sometimes harrowing and occasionally sweet novel confronting emotional disconnect, the relationship between humanity and nature, and modern fears about technology, all the while giving readers characters who care deeply about each other and the world around them. This smart, captivating and provocative book is highly recommended.”― Sarah Rachel Egelman, Bookreporter
“
Old King is an exhilarating journey through the terrain of our uneasy kinship with the wilderness. Every misdeed and every act of devotion is thrillingly, horrifically, tenderly, magnificently true in these mountains.”― Megha Majumdar, New York Times best-selling author of A Burning
“Propulsive and thought-provoking…[
Old King] examines the boundaries of society and solitude, the fine line between genius and madness.”― Jamie Ford, New York Times best-selling author of The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
“An unforgettable story about what we ask of the wilderness and one another,
Old King put its claws in me and didn’t let go. In crystalline prose, Maxim Loskutoff conjures an American West animated by both loneliness and love, weaving a kaleidoscopic story that is as historically gripping as it is timely today.”― Erica Berry, author of Wolfish
