Book Review: "Wounded" by Percival Everett

Published in 2005, this novel covers the horse-tamers, the riders and the cowboys of the western states of the USA. African-Americans centralise this novel with almost a feeling of terror, like morbid violins, playing beneath as it is not only they who are viewed as out of the ordinary by the stark white supporting cast.

The star of the novel, John Hunt, lives with his uncle Gus in Wyoming when a young homosexual man is murdered. John must find out who is doing this before it happens again and again. His entire world view is about to be challenged by everything he must find out, feed back and cover up in order to protect the people he cares about most for reasons he cannot tell anyone. Everett makes an excellent claim to the throne of the wild west in fiction and if I've said it once, I've said it a million times: it really does feel like you're watching an unmade Coen Brothers' film.

The novel is littered with intense descriptions of horses, of the plains and sensory moments that you can really breathe in. Descriptions take up pages at a time where everything has an eerie silence to it whilst you wait to find out what is going to happen next. One of my personal favourite descriptions is when John finds the tire tracks in chapter 4 and follows them on horseback. For an entire page, the novel goes quiet and every step that John takes is met with the threat of possible violence. It's like watching a horror movie and you're waiting for the jump scare. Everett writes the silence perfectly as he weaves in the sensory descriptions like lattices under the sound of hooves upon the guarded trail of mystery. It's one of those parts you just have to read again to appreciate the way in which the author creates a lack of sound along with the intense feeling of fear.

The dialogue is often terse and emotionless, which makes it harder to find out who the killer is since everyone feels about the case and yet nobody is willing to answer with a feeling of guilt, sadness, or even a sadistic nature. The dialogue juxtaposes the scenery and narrative perfectly since the descriptions are fearsome, blinding and intense, whilst the dialogue is cut short by its lack of information. When the information does build up in the dialogue, it is very slow and almost painful to witness.

I'm not sure if anyone else had this issue like I did but there is that moment in the book where you feel like you have put together the mystery faster than John Hunt and you know who has been committing these murders. It is quite painful to witness and when you realise that you are correct, it is even more painful to see how John Hunt must also come to that conclusion.

The ending is one of the best parts of the book because there is a whole lot of difference that comes together and yet, the mystery is almost solved. The ending is dark, brooding, sad and intense with the very flavour of abruptness that Percival Everett shows in his novel The Trees (which, by the way, had a brilliant ending if there ever was one). It has the feeling that maybe not everything is finished, not everything is tied up and there is something more horrific on the way - maybe we will never find out what it is but the future is coming nonetheless.

All in all, it may not be a 5/5 like The Trees, but it is definitely a strong novel without much fault. The descriptions are long and intense, the dialogue is terse and unforgiving, the characters are flawed, mad, strange, detached and more than often, hiding something and ultimately, the text is a brilliant testament to a type of novel that seems underwritten for no apparent reason. Percival Everett proves that once again, he's not only a master storyteller, but he can create characters that we put our entire faith in one moment, and then we are not too sure about the next. It is a wonderful novel that confronts the dangers of intolerance in the most raw and violent ways you can imagine.