A boy steals a dog and goes hitchhiking.

(from Ghosts of Wyoming)

There’s a precise (if hard to verbalize) kind of mood on every page, in every sentence. It’s a feeling of arcane wildness. The dim highways and open country, the hitchhiking, the coin-flip kindness/meanness of strangers met on the road — it feels like a rusted over, pre-cell phone version of America a passing reader like myself may hope still exists. Good story, too, with swift bits of tension and horror.