Hell's Bottom, Colorado
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the PEN USA Award for Fiction. “An admirable, steely-eyed collection of stories and vignettes featuring a family of ranchers.”—Publishers Weekly
On Hell’s Bottom Ranch, a section of land below the Front Range, there are women like Renny who prefer a “little Hell swirled with their Heaven” and men like Ben, her husband, who’s “gotten used to smoothing over Renny’s excesses.” There is a daughter who maybe plays it too safe and a daughter plagued by only “half-wanting” what life has to offer. The ranch has been the site of births and deaths of both cattle and children, as well as moments of amazing harmony and clear vision.
“Set in the unpredictable West, these stories remind us that we cannot escape the messiness and obsessions of ordinary life.”—Patricia Henley, author of Hummingbird House
“Displays the talent of a brilliant, new writer.”—The Rocky Mountain News
“With the rugged beauty of the Rocky Mountains as backdrop, Pritchett’s spare yet richly evocative stories portray the stark reality of life on a Colorado cattle ranch, where three generations of one family tend the land and animals, devoting and losing themselves to an existence few would understand or choose to follow . . . Regardless of whether the songs she hears are sung by a meadowlark or a jailbird, Pritchett excels at juxtaposing the sensuous with the severe, the rapturous with the repugnant.”—Booklist
“The stories jump back and forth in time, but their message is clear: this family’s ties are as quixotic, fierce, and enduring as the land that binds them together.”—School Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, Pritchett's debut is an admirable, steely-eyed collection of stories and vignettes featuring a family of ranchers in mountain-shadowed Colorado. Pritchett, raised a rancher herself, writes beautifully about the hard work and casual cruelty of ranch life. Forest fires, stillborn animals, poverty, cold and violence: all play as significant a role in the shaping of these characters as their emotionally hardscrabble family life. The three family groups that form the collection's core are brought uneasily together by an act of violence: the murder by her own husband, Ray of Rachel, youngest daughter of stubborn matriarch Renny. Some of the finest writing is in the stories about Rachel's children, Billy and Jess: "A Fine White Dust" chillingly illustrates their relationship with Rachel's abusive husband, and in "Dry Roots," one of the most painful and evocative stories, Billy and Jess come upon a horribly mutilated calf the property of a vicious neighbor and must make the decision to end its suffering. Pritchett's emotional revelations are often painted with broad strokes, as when Ben and Anita, estranged brother and sister, agree "that devastation looks pretty damn good from afar." But just as often, the writing is redeemed by fierce tenderness: "The wheat is starting to turn, flashes of deep gold streaking through tall, waving green....I suspect most city-folk... don't realize that wheat grows up green and living and then it dies, and that's when it becomes useful." Fans of Annie Proulx's Close Range: Wyoming Storiesand Jon Billman's When We Were Wolves should enjoy this visceral, accomplished collection.
