This is a savage, gutsy probe of suicide and its aftermath. These allegorically linked stories, notably the middle novellas, bring the reader to a naked immediacy, a place where there is no escape and no room to sit on the perimeter. David Vann has re-imagined his father's suicide (thirty years ago, when Vann was 13) and mythologized it in this semi-autobiographical memoir, and he has done this with a graphic, naked brawn and authenticity that I have rarely encountered in other stories of suicide, real or imagined. There is a place beyond the threshold, a place where gifted writers access with the reader in the subconscious strata, a sort of "it" place, for lack of a signifier. And Vann meets the reader here with a staggering intensity. It produced a chemical reaction, and I was fully in that submerged dimension.

Vann's influences are present, such as Cormac McCarthy (who also produces that chemical reaction in me), Elizabeth Bishop, and Chaucer, among others. But this is uniquely Vann's voice, an echo of his personal history, his education and beloved authors, with his own original stamp. Every passage is nuanced and muscular. There are also acrid scenes of Kafkaesque absurdity and graveyard insanity that blew me away.

I read his later Caribou Island: A Novel before this one. There is a linked sensibility in both stories, and even some of the character's names are used in both books. They are fused or clipped or reinvented altogether, but it is evident that names are critical and symbolic to Vann. This book, in my humble opinion, is the best of the two, a legitimate masterpiece. (Although, now that I have read this, it gives more heft to the later work.) I was deeply moved and impressed by CARIBOU ISLAND and wanted to go back to this earlier work. LEGEND OF A SUICIDE is now one of my favorite books of the year, and would be on any list of mine of best books of a lifetime.

Excuse my gushing and just read the book. I can tell you that the Alaskan wilderness will emerge as a character, that the eyes of the fish will both tyrannize and seduce you, that the barren coldness will incarcerate you. You will be hunted down and haunted.

"He dreamed he was chopping up bits of fish and every piece had a small pair of eyes and as he chopped, there was a moaning sound that was getting louder. It wasn't coming from the pieces of fish or their eyes exactly, but they were watching him and waiting to see what he would do."

I recommend this to anyone who wants a sublime reading experience.