Slipping Into the Skin: Down in the River by Ryan Blacketter

Down in the River
by Ryan Blacketter
Review by Christian Winn

It’s the hot end of summer when I sit down to re-read Down in the River , Ryan Blacketter’s remarkable, darkly startling and endearing debut novel.  I’m in a park abutting my own city’s river, and it’s got to be 90 degrees in the shade.  But, I’m feeling cold–the chill wrap of wet air all around me on an early winter evening as I stand amidst pines outside a café in Eugene, Oregon.

By the end of page two, it is not August in...