Book Summary and Reviews of Old King by Maxim Loskutoff

Book Summary

In this haunting novel about the end of the frontier dream, a man tries to reinvent himself in one of America's last wild territories, while his neighbor begins a crime spree that will tremble the nation.

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).

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. If you remember the UNABOM ordeal, how did this book interact with your memories? Did it change your ideas or assumptions? If you'd only heard about it, how did the book enrich your knowledge—not just of the events, but of the human themes involved?
2. A motif in the book—particularly for Duane and Jackie—is the microwave oven, a recent addition to American consumer life in the 1970s of the novel. How might this theme reflect the larger theme of technology and our relationship to it?
3. "Before coming to Montana, [Mason had] thought of the West as a dwindling dream, the last slivers of wild country in desperate need of protection. What he'd discovered was immensity. Overwhelming in scope and power" (p. 100)....