Tom's Crossing (Mark Z. Danielewski) REVIEW

 

TOM’S CROSSING

By Mark Z. Danielewski

Review by Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)

Twenty-five years after House of Leaves delivered a nuclear strike on readers’ brains, Mark Z. Danielewski rides back into view with Tom’s Crossing and death rides with him.

Set in Utah, 1982, this 1,232-page beast follows two teenage outcasts, namely Kalin March and Tom Gatestone, whose friendship ignites a small-town legend. When Tom dies young, Kalin swears to save the two horses his friend loved most from being slaughtered by local meat baron Orwin ‘Old’ Porch.

What starts as a rescue mission becomes something far bigger. This is the tale of a manhunt, a myth, a reckoning where the living and the dead both have unfinished business.

You know when a book grabs you from the first page and grips you, takes over your waking thoughts and makes you count down the minutes until you dive back in? Well that's what Tom's Crossing did to me!!

Tom’s Crossing trades basements for mountains, ink for dust, and typeface trickery for something rawer and more universal. Sentences roll like thunder, break into whispers, double back on themselves.

There’s a new kind of terror, too; it’s not the creeping dread of House of Leaves, but the fear invoked by the brutality of human rage and consequence. Old Porch, furious and armed, becomes an avatar of everything toxic in power and patriarchy. He’s a villain as Biblical as he is believable, a man so desperate to maintain control he will do unthinkable things and blame the kids who fled with his horses.

By the time Kalin and Tom’s sister Landry, reach the high pass of Pillars Meadow, the novel has transcended the western and turned mythic. You could say it’s part Iliad, part Blood Meridian, part ghost-lit American scripture.

For fans of House of Leaves, (as we are at Darkmatters) Tom’s Crossing is a revelation. Reality and myth burn through the lens of how memory ‘bends’ truth, leaving stories of the dead.

It’s sprawling, gorgeous, probably longer than it needs to be, but isn’t that part of the point? Every legend worth the name has room for exaggeration.

Tom’s Crossing is a singular, howling achievement, what feels like a million pages scrawled by a poet of the uncanny. It’s violent, lyrical, and unafraid of its own bigness. This is Danielewski burning a new trail, through blood, bone, and the language of the American myth.

By the end, I felt haunted, exhilarated, and strangely grateful that House of Leaves wasn’t a fluke.

An epic of grief, friendship, and redemption that dares to find ghosts not in walls, but in wide open sky.

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

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(5 - A blood-soaked miracle of storytelling… this is the Western reimagined as an elegy for both the living and the dead.)

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