Old King

In this novel about the end of the frontier dream, a logger builds a cabin near a recluse named Ted Kaczynski. In the spring of America’s bicentennial, a man named Duane Oshun runs out of gas in Lincoln, Montana, a former mining boomtown. In this outlaw community, Duane joins a logging crew, falls for a waitress, and attempts to befriend his neighbor, a loner named Ted Kaczynski. Though the two men share a fascination with the Old King, an ancient Douglas fir anchoring the valley’s endangered old-growth forest, Kaczynski's violent grievances against modern society will shake the nation and place Duane in grave danger. Told in four parts sweeping across two decades, Old King establishes Maxim Loskutoff as one of the most inventive and exciting authors of the American west. 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.