Mark Anthony Jarman

Mark Anthony Jarman unsettles the Wild West in this virtuosic, long-awaited novel.
“Go west, young man.” The unnamed hero of Mark Anthony Jarman’s Wild West heeds the call, and becomes an instrument of Custer or Riel or whoever wields the live-wire power and ulterior motives swirling from Assiniboia to Montana in the 1880s. Hungry and horny, our guy fights, digs graves, cuts ice, whatever needs doing in exchange for decent boots, a meal, and a drink to work up the guts to pursue Outside Woman, or maybe Inside Woman, avoid the hangman's noose, and try not to lose his mind.
Jarman rips the past out of the past and pushes it right in our faces. Brutality and encroaching madness pulse through every sentence. Wild West gives us the unsettling unconscious of a chaotic new territory, throwing everyone then and now in a startling light. Here it is, the great Canadian novel, and it will make you question what “Canadian” even is.