Cold Storage, Alaska (Straley) - Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions
1. Straley is often identified as a crime novelist, but he is quick to self-identify as an “oddball” of the genre. Is Cold Storage, Alaska crime fiction? Why or why not?

2. While in prison, Clive finds religion, but also picks up the unusual ability to hear animals speak. Do you think Clive is actually able to communicate with animals or is it an expression of something else? How does your response and its counterpoint affect your reading of the book?

3. Straley is often praised for his ability to infuse a sense of place into his novels, especially when he writes about Alaska. Did his descriptions of Cold Storage and rural Alaska feel true? Was it the Alaska you expected?

4. The popular joke in the town about the doctor who offers to boil an egg for his soon-to-be-dead patient displays a certain fatalism, a key part of Cold Storage’s identity and a central theme in the novel. Where else is this acquiescence to fate or destiny on display in the book?

5. If Cold Storage, Alaska were made into a movie, who would you cast as Miles and Clive?

6. Miles and Clive both left town and returned for different reasons: Clive for his fresh start and Miles for a life of quiet, but of course, neither gets what they are looking for. Even so, do you think the brothers ever seem to settle on a notion of “home?”

7. Of small Alaskan villages and the alcoholism and isolation they often engender, Straley’s writes, “In any northern village there is a darkness lurking.” Is Cold Storage ultimately a place of darkness or light?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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