Tom’s Crossing, the long-awaited new novel by House of Leaves author Mark Z. Danielewski, is on sale for an enormous discount just two weeks after hitting stores. Amazon has a limited-time deal on the hardcover edition of Tom’s Crossing that drops the price to only $23.27 (was $40). If that sounds like the price you’d expect out of the gate, there’s a good reason for the $40 MSRP: Tom’s Crossing is an epic 1,232-page novel that is probably best described as a horror-western–and a very good one, at that.
Mark Z. Danielewski – Tom’s Crossing: A Novel
$23.27 (was $40)
Set in 1982, Tom’s Crossing takes place in a small Utah county and the mountain ranges surrounding it. Kalin March, the 15-year-old protagonist and new resident in town, promises his dying friend that he will save two horses from slaughter. The friend, Tom Gatestone, accompanies Kalin from beyond the grave as a ghost.
Tom’s Crossing is beautifully written in a distinct style that feels like listening to a very clever friend tell ghost stories by a campfire.
If you’ve read Danielewski’s House of Leaves, The Familiar, or one of his other works, you may expect to see a wide array of fonts, inverted text, random pictures, academic citations, and other formatting oddities. But you actually won’t find any of those quirks here.
Tom’s Crossing is structured and presented like a conventional novel, one paragraph after another–though Danielewski does italicize dialogue instead of quotes. Traditional formatting means you won’t find large swaths of white space, so Tom’s Crossing is by far his longest novel by word count. But if you aren’t scared away by the staggering page count, I think you’ll find Tom’s Crossing to be Danielewski’s most approachable work of fiction. I eclipsed the halfway mark this week and am thoroughly enjoying it.
But if you don’t want to take this Steven’s word for it; the lone blurb on the back of the dust jacket is from Stephen King:
“This is an amazing work of fiction. I absolutely loved it. At the heart you’ll find a blood-drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children. But there’s so much more. I immersed myself. Have never read anything like it.”
Tom’s Crossing’s is Danielewski’s first book since the strange and unsettling 2019 picture book The Little Blue Kite. And it’s his first novel since 2017’s Redwood, Volume 5 of what was originally planned as a 27-volume series called The Familiar. Sadly, The Familiar was canceled by Danielewski’s publisher after the fifth volume due to low sales and high printing costs, but now longtime fans have a new doorstopper of a novel to spend many hours with.
If you haven’t read House of Leaves or want to gift a copy to a friend who loves puzzles this holiday, the 709-page paperback edition is on sale for $15.43 (was $29), and the 736-page hardcover edition is $31 (was $55). Both editions are eligible for Amazon’s Buy Two, Get One Free Book Sale. The last two volumes of The Familiar are eligible for the promotion, too.
