The Dogs of Winter Author: Kem Nunn | Language: English | ISBN:
B00AK78OE2 | Format: PDF
The Dogs of Winter Description
Amazon.com Review
Kem Nunn's earlier surfing novel
Tapping the Source was nominated for an American Book Award. In
The Dogs of Winter, he draws again on the eternal legends and tall tales of surfers. Jack Fletcher is a pill-popping photographer on the skids who lucks into the assignment of photographing the aging surfing legend Drew Harmon and two young pros at the Heart Attacks in Northern California--an appropriately difficult-to-reach and shark-infested "mysto spot" reputed to have 30-foot waves. Not all dangers lurk in the ocean, however. The local Indians are unfriendly to outsiders and to each other; Harmon's young wife is obsessed with Indian witchcraft and a murdered local girl; and Harmon cloaks his own demons in laconic surfer-deity mystique. The hapless Fletcher and a local tribal council worker named Travis McCade desperately try to avert the curl of disaster that builds and breaks in this heavily atmospheric novel.
From Publishers Weekly
"Surfers loved their stories. Big waves and outlaws. Eccentrics who had managed somehow to beat the system, to stay in the life when others moved inland and paid taxes." No one knows this better than Nunn (Pomona Queen), who, after 13 years, returns to the California surfing setting of his acclaimed first novel, Tapping the Source. Despite recent screw-ups, past-his-prime surfing photographer Fletcher is hired by a glossy surfing magazine to shoot aging master Drew Harmon and a couple of hot-shot tyros at a legendary Northern California beach dubbed Heart Attacks. The assignment is a bonehead idea from the start. Harmon?a semi-recluse who lives on an Indian reservation and pitched the photo shoot for unknown reasons?has no idea where Heart Attacks actually is. He's not entirely sane, in fact, and neither is his wife, a working witch. Also, the residents of the reservation are eager for confrontation, and murderously outsized cold-water waves (known to surfers as "dogs of winter") pound the shoreline. The novel begins to build a head of steam as an examination of how outsiders can wreak havoc on a small community. The tone changes dramatically when the surfers hit the road and are hunted by a band of Native Americans who've burnt down Harmon's home and kidnapped his wife. But this is no chase-the-gun-down thriller, and before you can say, "endless summer," the plot veers off in an even more sinister direction. Chapters alternate in perspective between those of Fletcher, Harmon's wife and a mixed-race official from the tribal council who bears the unlikely name of Travis McCade. It's hard to understand McCade's purpose in the novel since, structurally speaking, all he does is provide a sane foil for Harmon and fall for the man's wife. Fletcher serves the same functions, and more naturally. Even so, the story rides high, sped by prose as crisp as a breaking wave, as Nunn, a skilled author, once again writes deeply about a subject he knows and loves. Paperback rights to Washington Square Press; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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- File Size: 703 KB
- Print Length: 368 pages
- Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (September 17, 2013)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00AK78OE2
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #48,795 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
This is not the kind of book I would normally pick up. The title is not so great. "Dogs of Winter" sounds like a straight-to-video action flick starring Charlie Sheen.
Then you read the back cover copy.
It's about a mystical cove in California. A place surfers talk about in hushed tones. The Devil's Hoof, home to the last great wave. Nobody has ever found it, but many have searched in vain. Until now. When I read that, I thought: okay - it's a surfer version of that over-rated Alex Garland book, "The Beach".
A group made up of two young surfers, a grizzled old photographer, a legendary surfer and a young kid find the cove and decide to make something of it, which riles the local Indian population somewhat. When the kid vanishes beneath one of the great waves, the local Indian population decide to retaliate: the legendary surfer's half-mad wife is abducted and the young surfer, the old photographer and the legendary surfer disappear into the woods roundabout. At which point, it's a case of Alex Garland's "The Beach" meets - what? "Straw Dogs"? "Deliverance"?
I'll tell you. When I started reading I thought: this is a book without surprises.
I only started reading because of a conversation with a friend. We were talking about end-of-year polls, how you can often hear about books and music that passed you by, how you can often pick up a treat that otherwise you might have missed. He told me that he spotted "Dogs of Winter" in one such poll two or more years ago. He told me I should read it and - you know, you feel kind of obligated after that, right?
Recommendation notwithstanding, I approached this book like I'd approach a snake with it's back up.I'll tell you - I'll hold my hands up - I was wrong.
Atmosphere is king in Nunn's forth novel, an oddly assembled and arranged rambling semi-thriller about the quest to find a legendary secret surfing spot on the far northern California coast. The story treads much of the same turf as Alex Garland's The Beach, James Dickey's Deliverance, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness-but pales in comparison to all of them (yes, even The Beach). We meet a rapidly aging down-and-out surfing photographer who gets one last chance: he's to accompany two young pro surf hotshots as they meet up with a former legend who claims to know where the secret spot is and will guide them there. With this holy grail of surfing as the catalyst, the men journey to way northern California to meet the old legend, who lives with his weird young wife in Indian land. She forms the basis for another plotline, as she asks around about a local girl who was apparently murdered by an Indian. For reasons that are never explained, she's obsessed with local Indian witchcraft, and wanders the woods at night. One of the novel's big flaws is that she's very poorly drawn, and it's hard to understand why she's married to the ex-surfer king, or what she's doing there.
As the surfers pursue their primal communion with the ocean, they manage to stir up trouble with the Indians, who aren't keen on outsiders. Next thing you know, some serious evil types arrive from "upriver", where the meth labs are... The tension mounts as the surfers hike all over, looking for the spot, unaware that some stone-killer Indians are on their trail. Eventually, the various obsessions and plotlines start to get all tangled up, and even the well-meaning people in the story can't escape. The whole thing is kind of alternately cheezy and offhandedly violent.
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