"They have the spirits of the damned."
"They're hungry wolves, hungry animals. Nothing more."
"I don't mean wolves."
"I'll go now," he said.
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly
they are ravening wolves."
"That's the Gospel of Matthew."
And so on. Also, Giraldi treats us to the classic Man vs. Nature theme which, in the spirit of Jack London, that seminal lover of the cold and stark setting, morphs into a Man vs. Man which in turn transfigures into that most human of conflicts, Man vs. Himself.
That brutal landscape (again, in the fashion of classic literature) expands into a character, a presence, a mysterious god whose force unleashes the primal violence and desire seated deep in our seemingly-civilized souls. The village itself is unbelievably named for a terrifying mythical demon dog. Besides the three children taken by wolves in the first paragraph, we have the story of a "girl mashed inside the digestive tract" of a wolf, the revenge killing of a wolf, and this surprisingly cheery, poetic description of wartime violence all within the first few pages:
When the .50-caliber rounds hit them they tore off limbs or else left dark blue holes the size of plums. He fired into those on the fuel-damp sand and those still crammed inside the truck's flattened cab. Their blood burst in the wind as wisps of orange and red. Curious how orange, how radiant blood looks beneath a desert non, in the dull even tinge of its light.And the body count and blood flow does not abate through the succeeding chapters. Giraldi appears to want to position himself as the Cormac McCarthy of the tundra, another sparse landscape and lawless terrain where the distinction between man and beast blurs in a stain of blood and brilliant sunsets.
The book turns on two unexpected plot twists, one regarding the supposedly wolf-taken boy from the first line, and a second involving the nature of the relationship between the boy's parents. That first twist is beautifully gruesome and breathtaking, but the second, coming in the final pages of the novel, is disappointingly corny and needless. It was a shame for Giraldi to end the story with a plot twist straight out of soap operas, after successfully painting such a lovely, stark image of love, evil, revenge, and desire. It would be as if "To Build a Fire" ended with the writer revealing that the main character had dreamed the entire story, or if 1984 had ended with Orwell explaining that Winston and Big Brother were actually brothers (a lá the ridiculous familial revelations in Star Wars).
However, Hold the Dark redeems itself in the person of Vernon Slone, a man's man who simultaneously attracts and repels us. Upon encountering one of his army buddies in the middle of raping an Afghan girl, Slone saves the girl. Such a hero, eh? Ah, but he does so by stabbing the soldier through the ear, a grisly salvation Giraldi depicts with his characteristic staid horror:
He stabbed this soldier through the right ear. A centimeter of the knife's tip poked through his left temple and Slone felt the body go limp on the blade. He held the man's drooped form upright with the knife so he would not topple on the girl. He then thrust him quickly back and yanked free the blade in the same even motion. The serrated side of the knife was crammed now with bone and brain.Yikes. The book, and Slone, rolls on in this manner, with stretches of snowy tension punctuated by storms of extreme violence. I found myself in the end, however, wanting to love this story as much as I loved those gems of seventh-grade literature - "The Necklace," "The Call of the Wild," "The Gift of the Magi" - but sadly, could not. I just wish some editor had talked Giraldi into polishing up the ending. Then his book, too, might have become assigned reading in schools, though likely not for seventh-graders.
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