What do you think?
Trail of Hearts Blood Wherever We Go: A Novel
Eddie Ryan, haiku poet, Vietnam veteran, and town mortician of Inverawe, New Hampshire, sps his days slipping hand-written poems into the pockets of the departed, keeping lists of bizarre local deaths, and protecting his wife and children from his own fear and anxiety. Then, one snowy Christmas eve, a gypsy logger named Cody steers his truck onto Ryan's front lawn--with the accidentally bisected corpse of his partner strapped to his plow. Cody, garrulous and grieving, wins Eddie's sympathy and a place to stay. Soon, Eddie and Cody find themselves sping time together fishing, hunting, drinking, and unraveling the secrets of their Inverawe neighbors, including the most troubling mystery of all--who is stealing the hearts from Eddie's corpses and why. A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go is vintage lyrical, heady, and full of hard-won wisdom.
- GenresFiction
416 pages, Paperback
Published August 15, 1998
About the author
Robert Olmstead
30 books156 followersRobert Olmstead (born January 3, 1954) is an award-winning American novelist and educator.
Olmstead was born in 1954 in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. He grew up on a farm. After high school, he enrolled at Davidson College with a football scholarship, but left school after three semesters in which he compiled a poor academic record. He later attended Syracuse University, where he studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and received both bachelor's and master's degrees, in 1977 and 1983, respectively.
He is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has also served as the Senior Writer in Residence at Dickinson College and as the director of creative writing at Boise State University. Olmstead teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in creative writing at Converse College .
Olmstead is the author of the novels America by Land, A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go and Soft Water. He is also the author of a memoir Stay Here With Me, as well as River Dogs, a collection of short stories, and the textbook Elements of the Writing Craft.[2] He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and an NEA Literature Fellowship in 1993.
His novel Coal Black Horse (2007) has received national acclaim, including the 2007 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction[7] and the 2008 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction; it was also selected for the "On the Same Page Cincinnati" reading program and the Choose to Read Ohio’s 2011 booklist.
Booklist has named his latest novel Far Bright Star (2009) (the second book in the Coal Black Horse trilogy) as one of the Top Ten Westerns of the Decade; the book also received the 2010 Western Writers of America Spur Award. One reviewer praised Olmstead's ability to "translate nature's revelatory beauty into words", commenting that Coal Black Horse evokes what Henry David Thoreau described in Walden as "the indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature"; by contrast, the Mexican desert of Far Bright Star is "the place of the sun shriveled and the dried up". The Chicago Tribune review praised the authenticity of the imagery and experiences in Olmstead's writing, while also comparing his writing to that of Ernest Hemingway. It noted the influence of contemporary events, such as the guerrila warfare during the U.S. occupation of Fallujah during the Iraq War.
Olmstead was born in 1954 in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. He grew up on a farm. After high school, he enrolled at Davidson College with a football scholarship, but left school after three semesters in which he compiled a poor academic record. He later attended Syracuse University, where he studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and received both bachelor's and master's degrees, in 1977 and 1983, respectively.
He is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has also served as the Senior Writer in Residence at Dickinson College and as the director of creative writing at Boise State University. Olmstead teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in creative writing at Converse College .
Olmstead is the author of the novels America by Land, A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go and Soft Water. He is also the author of a memoir Stay Here With Me, as well as River Dogs, a collection of short stories, and the textbook Elements of the Writing Craft.[2] He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and an NEA Literature Fellowship in 1993.
His novel Coal Black Horse (2007) has received national acclaim, including the 2007 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction[7] and the 2008 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction; it was also selected for the "On the Same Page Cincinnati" reading program and the Choose to Read Ohio’s 2011 booklist.
Booklist has named his latest novel Far Bright Star (2009) (the second book in the Coal Black Horse trilogy) as one of the Top Ten Westerns of the Decade; the book also received the 2010 Western Writers of America Spur Award. One reviewer praised Olmstead's ability to "translate nature's revelatory beauty into words", commenting that Coal Black Horse evokes what Henry David Thoreau described in Walden as "the indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature"; by contrast, the Mexican desert of Far Bright Star is "the place of the sun shriveled and the dried up". The Chicago Tribune review praised the authenticity of the imagery and experiences in Olmstead's writing, while also comparing his writing to that of Ernest Hemingway. It noted the influence of contemporary events, such as the guerrila warfare during the U.S. occupation of Fallujah during the Iraq War.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 27, 2011
I could go on and on, but the best thing I can say about A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go is that it's my favorite book!
April 23, 2009
Great undertones, mood. Slowed a little in the middle, but by the end, had that McCarthy "Suttree", or "Orchard Keeper" kind of feeling. Liked it a lot...
June 20, 2014
I found this book at the library in my small town. The librarian has worked there for many years. She often sticks book reviews and news clippings into books. For this particular book, she typed a special message and placed it into the book flap to cover the blurb.
The note says:
" If you read the publisher's flyleaf, many of the small mysteries and surprises of the story will be laid bare before your eyes. Trust instead that Olmstead has written a marvelous metaphor of the throbbing machinery of relationship pulsing through daily life; men and men, women and men, community and individual.
The reverberations of this force that propel Olmstead's prose bring to mind the varied family and neighbors with whom we share our lives. In a small New Hampshire town through the heart and eyes of the local undertaker, Eddie Ryan, the reader embarks on a journey of discovery. It is a path parallel to our own, full of humor, tragedy, willfulness and wistfulness. Olmstead's gift is that he makes this journey bring with meaning and interest."
******
So, I would hate to say more. But I enjoyed reading this with its many nuances and subtleties of real life and thought. And it has left me thinking about it a lot. Not totally my favorite book (hence 4 stars) but I'm sure glad I read it.
The note says:
" If you read the publisher's flyleaf, many of the small mysteries and surprises of the story will be laid bare before your eyes. Trust instead that Olmstead has written a marvelous metaphor of the throbbing machinery of relationship pulsing through daily life; men and men, women and men, community and individual.
The reverberations of this force that propel Olmstead's prose bring to mind the varied family and neighbors with whom we share our lives. In a small New Hampshire town through the heart and eyes of the local undertaker, Eddie Ryan, the reader embarks on a journey of discovery. It is a path parallel to our own, full of humor, tragedy, willfulness and wistfulness. Olmstead's gift is that he makes this journey bring with meaning and interest."
******
So, I would hate to say more. But I enjoyed reading this with its many nuances and subtleties of real life and thought. And it has left me thinking about it a lot. Not totally my favorite book (hence 4 stars) but I'm sure glad I read it.
February 3, 2024
What a strange, beautiful, snd solemn book. It is multi-layered, full of odd but reliable, hard-nosed and depressive characters. The plot is thin but the settings are beautifully described. I nearly wept reading about the passing of clouds over the Ryan house while a phone rang… yeah, it was that powerful.
This is the tale of Eddie Ryan: undertaker, traumatized veteran, and quasi-poet. It is a New England world wrapped as much in mystical experiences, memory, and the ordinary acts (made nearly mythical in scale) of a small-town community in the fictional town of Invarawe as it is in clouds, mist, and fog. It is very slow burn and not for the reader looking for high action. Rather, what the book describes is a liminal zone—a purgatorial place—of emotion, trauma, and the making of meaning by fallible characters. They are realistic, rugged, salt of the earth types who revel in work and work to accept the reality of their own deaths.
It is a beautiful book if you can keep calm and accept that the art lies in the setting and circumstances, and not so much in rapid plot development. It is not boring by any means, but then again, I am a fan of Olmstead. To many, this may be boring…
Aside from Coal Black Horse, Soft Water, and River Dogs, it may well be called his highest artistic achievement. I just wish it was more accessible for a wider audience and not such an esoteric read.
This is the tale of Eddie Ryan: undertaker, traumatized veteran, and quasi-poet. It is a New England world wrapped as much in mystical experiences, memory, and the ordinary acts (made nearly mythical in scale) of a small-town community in the fictional town of Invarawe as it is in clouds, mist, and fog. It is very slow burn and not for the reader looking for high action. Rather, what the book describes is a liminal zone—a purgatorial place—of emotion, trauma, and the making of meaning by fallible characters. They are realistic, rugged, salt of the earth types who revel in work and work to accept the reality of their own deaths.
It is a beautiful book if you can keep calm and accept that the art lies in the setting and circumstances, and not so much in rapid plot development. It is not boring by any means, but then again, I am a fan of Olmstead. To many, this may be boring…
Aside from Coal Black Horse, Soft Water, and River Dogs, it may well be called his highest artistic achievement. I just wish it was more accessible for a wider audience and not such an esoteric read.
June 9, 2022
3-1/2 stars
This book is a study in characters, settings, and situations. No matter what the blurb says, it is not about someone stealing the hearts from bodies, which is only a very small part of the novel. I admire this author’s use of language and vernacular, but the story is a bit odd. I take exception to the dialogue of the child Eileen, a six-year-old, as I taught only 5-8 year-olds for 31 years. He has her involved with using both exceptional vocabulary about adult ideas, and big city street language, which I thought was a stretch.
About the author’s skill with words, though:
“She took up a good part of his life, the years when events get set in the mind like gold leaf.”
“Whole shadows pass over the house, sending it from light to dark as the sunlight becomes buried in the tumbles of white clouds that seem to like it so much along the banks of the river.”
“Off the edge of the lawn … yellow flowers suspended in the air, running wild on slender stems. Whole valleys of undulant yellow flowers, growing abundant in the ditches, brimming the road banks and disappearing at the edges of the wet black forests.”
“Raindrops come too. Huge as they are, they can almost be heard whistling through the air. There aren’t many, but the ones that do come are fat and make splatting sounds, frogs in a pond.”
This book is a study in characters, settings, and situations. No matter what the blurb says, it is not about someone stealing the hearts from bodies, which is only a very small part of the novel. I admire this author’s use of language and vernacular, but the story is a bit odd. I take exception to the dialogue of the child Eileen, a six-year-old, as I taught only 5-8 year-olds for 31 years. He has her involved with using both exceptional vocabulary about adult ideas, and big city street language, which I thought was a stretch.
About the author’s skill with words, though:
“She took up a good part of his life, the years when events get set in the mind like gold leaf.”
“Whole shadows pass over the house, sending it from light to dark as the sunlight becomes buried in the tumbles of white clouds that seem to like it so much along the banks of the river.”
“Off the edge of the lawn … yellow flowers suspended in the air, running wild on slender stems. Whole valleys of undulant yellow flowers, growing abundant in the ditches, brimming the road banks and disappearing at the edges of the wet black forests.”
“Raindrops come too. Huge as they are, they can almost be heard whistling through the air. There aren’t many, but the ones that do come are fat and make splatting sounds, frogs in a pond.”
May 9, 2024
Tracks the relationship between a logger named Cody and a mortician named Eddie Ryan as well as other inhabitants of the fictional town Inverwae, New Hampshire. Cody and Eddie meet one Christmas Eve when Cody brings the body of his logging partner to Eddie’s home. Originally published in 1990.
March 21, 2023
This book has a real 'what if Willa Cather was a Vietnam vet with PTSD?' feel to it. So, like, some good moments.
April 3, 2012
This was a great character study kind of book. He's an undertaker and someone is stealing his customers hearts. The problem is, it takes over 200 pages before they get to that. At 420 pages expect a long read.
March 10, 2015
This is a real "man's" book, about love, friendship, fatherhood, and community. filled with grace and humanity in the passionate, humorous prose of one our most gifted authors. I recommend this book to everyone without reservation.
June 17, 2009
Probably my favorite of all of Robert's books. The characters are incredible. I was reading this while I took a workshop from Robert. Great memories.
August 22, 2012
I love Robert Olmstead's writing style but this is my favorite of his fiction pieces.
October 31, 2014
As poor as Coal Black Horse was good.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews