Rivers to the Heartland

Rivers by Michael Farris Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Michael Farris Smith is a beautiful writer. His spare, thoughtful prose weaves a spell of immediacy, beauty, and wit. While comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are inevitable, Rivers carves its own path into apocalypse and dystopia. It’s speculative fiction about constant hurricanes along the Florida coast and the consequent breakdown of society. It’s about a man and his horse and his guns and his own two hard-working hands, and his dog and his true love and his grief and his honor and what he’s got to do when there are folks depending on him, with enemies all around. The true literary territory of Rivers is the Western. Science fiction, it’s not.

If you like to read Cormac McCarthy, Kent Haruf, Hemingway, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, and can handle some bleakness and despair, this book will knock your socks off.


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