A creepy, evocative Dust Bowl tale of con-men and folklore
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| cover painting by William Holbrook Beard, 1885 |
Remember high school English class? Remember MAN VS. MAN, MAN VS. NATURE, MAN VS. GOD, etc? In my high school lit class, we did not use A03-style tags. These categories were mutually exclusive: if this then not that, certainly not both, let alone all of the above! But Rainmaker, Rainmaker, rises above such artificial categorization. It is all of these, and more. It's a skillfully written, deeply unsettling book that risks, I fear, being lost in the maelstrom of traditionally-published books that bear the advantage of professional marketing and word-of-mouth and established writer reputations.
Unless I can change that here, today. Because this creepy story of folklore and con-men and Dust Bowl desperation does not deserve to be overlooked amidst the unnavigable volume of 21st century publishing.
MAN VS NATURE: Greenheart, 1936. A once prospering farming town on the great plains of USA is now crumbling under the destruction of the Dust Bowl. Storms bring blinding, choking, unbreathable dust that leaves behind dead bodies, drowned on dry land, their lungs choked with dirt. There is no water; crops will not grow; starving rabbits infest the land and eat everything that grows.
MAN VS MAN: Into this slow, scrabbling decline, a stranger comes to town: Gideon Starling. He brings with him wealth, glamour, impossible tales of exotic travels. He has been everywhere, done everything. And he promises that he can make it rain in Greenheart.
He hires our narrator, a teenager named Will Thorpe, pays him handsomely, and asks of him nothing more than his company. Oh, and also, everything he knows about everyone in town. Basic information, nothing huge: what do people say, what do they think, who do they like, who do they hate? Gideon makes friends; he sows hope. But not everyone is as dazzled by his worldly charisma, and fault lines develop.
MAN VS GOD: Who is Gideon Starling? What makes him so unnaturally compelling? Why does the reader find him disturbing -- well before Will starts having doubts -- and mistrust him so deeply that she finds herself putting the book down and avoiding picking it up again without proper mental preparation? Because I want to be very clear here: for all his charisma in the town of Greenheart, for all his sinister vibes, on the page Gideon Starling is no sexy shadow daddy. He's creepy as hell. The events of the first half or more of the book correspond to a straightforward enough bit of literary fiction about con men preying upon desperate people in an evocative setting; but the mood and tone make it clear that something much more disquieting is going on.
Properly exploring that last A03-style tag would bring me into the realm of spoilers, but playing properly coy would make it impossible for me to remark upon some of the most lasting and successful elements of the book. I'm not going to be shy about pointing out that the cover image, a 19th century painting by William Holbrook Beard of a fox-king receiving tribute from his woodland prey subjects, is less metaphorical than it first appears. I'm going to remind people of that awful realization that Julia experiences in The Magicians that a Trickster-fox is everyone's favourite bit of folklore until he actually works his mischief on you, at which point you realize that some types of mischief are not cute and quirky, but absolutely fucking awful. And I'm going to remark what a brilliant concept it is to have creatures from folklore falling into their own portal fantasy, ending up trapped in a world where their magic doesn't work and they must scrabble to survive.
Just as the farmers were betrayed by nature, finding themselves trapped in someplace weird and terrifying, where everything they thought was true and reliable -- the rain, the wind -- no longer works as it should, so too are these creatures trapped in the wrong world, unable to return to the home they knew. Just as those displaced Dust Bowl farmers become itinerant wanderers, seeking to find a new place, to make a new life, so too must these creatures find-- or make -- or ruthlessly carve -- a new niche for themselves. Some are more successful than others; some make allies, some exploit enemies. Some betray the innocent. The best stories have layers, and the layers that make up this tale -- the unearthliness of the Dust Bowl, which drowns its victims without water; the unexpected cruel humanity of these trapped, homesick creatures of myth and legend -- make a compelling narrative.
Hillstrom is not the only writer to have recently observed the otherworldly potential of the Dust Bowl as a setting. Last year's excellent The Antidote, by Karen Russell, told a very different type of story that built on many of the same components as Rainmaker Rainmaker: the brutality of the jackrabbit drives, the terrible dust storms, the role of Works Progress Administration photographers as key sources of documentary evidence. They're wonderfully evocative narrative tools, and the fact that two such different books have come out so close to each other makes me wonder -- why only two? Why do writers not use this setting more often? It's fantastic!
There are a few issues this book that could have been tightened up. Some revelations rely on a rather tired trope of meeting someone who just happens to have some very esoteric knowledge conveniently stored in his home library. Others rely on essentially tying the hero to a chair and monologuing at him. But where some tropes are deployed in conventional ways, other issues of pacing are nonstandard, but thereby effective and novel. A leisurely epilogue might feel like an oddly slow fade-out, but it has the effect of properly acknowledging that people's lives can extend beyond the main events of a book. Learning how these characters grow and move apart and experience joys and successes and griefs and utterly mundane disappointments does a lot to make them more real than when they were merely actors in a fantastical story.
Give this book a read, friends! There is gold to be found in the roiling tumult of self-published, indie-published, small-press-published books that struggle for visibility in the shadows of the big names. It is my privilege to dive therein and come out with treasures to share with you. This is one such treasure. Please come and have a gander at it.
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The Math
Nerd coefficient: 8: Well worth your time and attention
Highlights:
- Evocative Dust Bowl setting
- Folklore
- Con men
References:
Hillstrom, Kevin B., Rainmaker, Rainmaker [2026].
Russel, Karen., The Antidote. [Knopf 2025].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.
