Old King

In the summer of 1976, Duane Oshun finds himself stranded in a remote Montana town beset by a series of strange and menacing events. He takes a job as a logger and builds a cabin on an isolated road near a reclusive neighbor—a hermit named Ted Kaczynski.

The two men are captivated by the valley’s endangered old-growth forest, but Kaczynski’s violent grievances against modern society soon threaten the lives of all those around him. As Kaczynski’s bombs crescendo to the book’s devastating conclusion, Old King wrestles with the birth of the modern environmental movement, the accelerating dominion of technology in American life, and a new kind of violence that lives next door.

Told in four parts sweeping across two decades, Old King establishes Maxim Loskutoff as one of the most thrilling and inventive authors of the American west, a writer “endowed with fearless audacity, stunning grace, and gutsy heart” (Nickolas Butler).

"Eerily atmospheric, keep-you-up-late suspenseful." -- Alexis Burling - San Francisco Chronicle
"Loskutoff writes beautifully about nature.... He deftly captures how the environment is both enchanting and fearsome." -- Mark Athitakis - Los Angeles Times
"The evils of ever-encroaching technology and environmental degradation are admirably presented by Loskutoff not as the bugaboos of an unhinged crank, but as real-life conflicts in the ecotone of town and wild country." -- Smith Henderson - New York Times Book Review
"Old King is a compelling, sometimes harrowing and occasionally sweet novel confronting emotional disconnect, the relationship between humanity and nature, and modern fears about technology, all the while giving readers characters who care deeply about each other and the world around them. This smart, captivating and provocative book is highly recommended." -- Sarah Rachel Egelman - Bookreporter
"A gripping story of love and compassion, the end of the counterculture movement, and the nihilism and violence that replaced it. Maxim Loskutoff delves deep into America’s changing narrative, our lost connection to nature, and our attempts to regain them." -- Philipp Meyer, Pulitzer Prize finalist author of The Son
"Old King is an exhilarating journey through the terrain of our uneasy kinship with the wilderness. Every misdeed and every act of devotion is thrillingly, horrifically, tenderly, magnificently true in these mountains." -- Megha Majumdar, New York Times best-selling author of A Burning
"A Cormac McCarthy-esque story of a deeply troubled American west, Old King is lyrical, haunting, humane, and unflinching. It reads like an approaching thunderstorm, one from which you cannot shelter." -- Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
"Propulsive and thought-provoking . . . [Old King] examines the boundaries of society and solitude, the fine line between genius and madness." -- Jamie Ford, New York Times best-selling author of The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
"An unforgettable story about what we ask of the wilderness and one another, Old King put its claws in me and didn’t let go. In crystalline prose, Maxim Loskutoff conjures an American West animated by both loneliness and love, weaving a kaleidoscopic story that is as historically gripping as it is timely today." -- Erica Berry, author of Wolfish
"Powerful and suspenseful…Loskutoff’s narrative is swiftly paced and deeply textured, with a keen sense of the landscape and its cantankerous human inhabitants. This leaves a mark." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An expert panorama ... Coming on the heels of his outstanding 2020 novel, Ruthie Fear, Old King shows that Mr. Loskutoff is unmatched at evoking the contentious, transitional nature of the American West, which is roiled by changing environmental values and economic realities, a place of new and clashing mythologies." -- Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
"The undying allure of the West and that attraction’s lethal impact on the wilderness is a pervasive theme for writer Maxim Loskutoff … In Loskutoff’s hands, the Unabomber, as Kaczynski came to be known, is real but also a symbol of the ultimate outsider in a state, Montana, that’s full of them." -- Maren Longbella - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Maxim Loskutoff is the award-winning author of Old King, Ruthie Fear and Come West and See. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, and GQ. He lives in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana.

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