Ploughmen (Zupan) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Set in northern Montana, the novel presents a powerful and implacable landscape, all dry soil and fractured river breaks…Zupan is also a carpenter, and he writes with the precision of his trade. He does not shy away from themes of innocence or guilt. Neither does he exploit those themes in the service of melodrama. Riffing on the rhythms of Cormac McCarthy, he composes vivid scenes of tenderness and manipulation between the two men. Millimaki and Gload develop a jailhouse relationship that is convincing, and harrowing…The book features plenty of suspense. What it offers in addition are Zupan's considerable skills with description and mood…The Ploughmen is a dark and imaginative debut.
Alyson Hagy - New York Times Book Review


Mr. Zupan produces pleasurably lush and baroque prose, especially when describing his setting’s awesome and unforgiving topography.
Wall Street Journal


Passionately arresting… Even though Zupan’s novel deals with grim topics, he plows the depths of grief and numbness with such a concentrated dedication that the prose is a character in itself. His sentences are unleashed in a furious splendor… bleak and brilliant—the best kind of book.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


Stunning…A remarkable novel... It's almost hard to believe that it’s a debut…. It's a portrait of the West as a sometimes desolate and cold place, full of possibility, maybe, but also full of danger from every corner. It's a modern West, caught between the romance of the frontier and the mundane, harsh realities of living in the present day United States. And it’s absolutely beautiful, from its tragic opening scene to its tough, necessary end. Zupan is an unsparing writer, but also a generous, deeply compassionate one.
NPR


The expansive, indifferent and lonely landscapes that populate the book are as vital as the two main characters and elevate Mr. Zupan’s work from a story about an unlikely friendship to a solemn exploration of the human soul—and how it is formed by the space that surrounds it.
Pittsburg Post-Gazette


Gripping… a strong debut for a talented wordsmith…. Zupan has that rare skill and we as readers are better off for it.
Montana Magazine


We know we are in the hands of a master storyteller from the very first pages of Kim Zupan’s powerful, beautifully crafted debut novel The Ploughmen…. The searing, lyrical prose, relentless violence, and tenuous moments of reprieve are reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor…. The disturbing yet quietly redemptive finale to this gripping and psychologically nuanced tale leaves the reader satisfied. Bravo, Mr. Zupan.
Montana Quarterly


Nuanced…fascinating…What Zupan offers is a superb, retro prose style, channeling William Faulkner in long passages engorged with vocabulary, and meditations on what it means to be alive, if barely, in rural Montana circa 1980…a rich, morose meditation on death, law enforcement, and friendship.
BookPage


It would be too simple to say The Ploughmen centers on the idea of good and evil; it is not so black and white as that. The story is perpetually gray, with pockets of light and dark, not just in its morality but in its scenery…. [Zupan] writes with a kind of straightforwardness reminiscent of Kerouac. This memorable debut is at times strikingly beautiful, while at others quite bleak, but it is always poignant.
Booklist


[A] riveting debut….A fascinating first novel that examines the complexities of two men, opposites in every way, whose lives nevertheless intertwine. With such a strong debut, Zupan’s literary future looks exceptionally promising.
Library Journal


Serial killer bonds with cop in a first novel with a high body count.... Val Millimaki...has been given the graveyard shift to guard [Gload] and pry loose details of old crimes. The two discover they were both farm kids, plowing the fields.... It's not the paucity of action but the flawed characterizations that hurt this oppressive work the most.
Kirkus Reviews