Contemporary Authors

• Bearskin ( novel) Ecco (New York, NY), 2017

1. Bearskin James A. McLaughlin. LCCN 2017034531 Type of material Book Personal name McLaughlin, James A., author. Main title Bearskin / James A. McLaughlin. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Ecco, [2017] Projected pub date 1806 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9780062742797 9780062742803

• James A McLaughlin - https://jamesamclaughlin.com/about/

  James A. McLaughlin
  About

  James A. McLaughlin is a native of Virginia who lives in the Wasatch Range east of Salt Lake City, Utah. He holds law and MFA degrees from the University of Virginia.

  His essays and fiction have appeared in River Teeth, Camas, Portland Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and elsewhere. His essay “¡No Pasaran! Rage and ORVs” was chosen as a Notable Essay of 2003 in The Best American Essays, 2004. His novella “Bearskin” appeared Summer 2008 in The Missouri Review and won the 2009 William Peden Prize in fiction. His novel Bearskin was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in June 2018. He’s currently working on two novels related to Bearskin and set in Virginia and the American Southwest.

  Photographic interests include wildlife, landscape, and human ecology, and his photographs have appeared in numerous publications including Virginia Wildlife, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and The Missouri Review.

  Instagram: jamesamcl37

  James is represented by Kirby Kim at Janklow & Nesbit.

  All text and photographs on this website are the property of James A. McLaughlin, are protected by copyright, and are not to be copied, printed, transmitted, or otherwise reproduced without the prior written permission of James A. McLaughlin.

• Mystery People - https://mysterypeople.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/interview-with-james-a-mclaughlin/

  INTERVIEW / UNCATEGORIZED
  INTERVIEW WITH JAMES A MCLAUGHLIN
  JUNE 25, 2018 MYSTERYPEOPLESCOTTLEAVE A COMMENT
  James A McLaughlin’s Bearskin is a debut novel that announces the a new talent with a lot of promise. The protagonist is Rice Moore, a man hiding from a Mexican drug cartel in Applachia as the caretaker of a wilderness preserve. When he discovers the carcasses of mutilated bears on his land, he goes up against a black market ring as well as his old enemies. It is a crime thriller rich in character and sens of place packing one powerful voice. Mr. McLaughlin was kind enough to talk about Bearskin and where it takes place.

  Image result for james mclaughlin bearskinMysteryPeople Scott: Rice Moore is a complex character that is full of contradictions, yet I saw a certain moral through line to him. How did he come about?

  James A. McLaughlin: When I decided to completely rewrite the first version of Bearskin after a long hiatus, I stripped out all of the main characters but kept the setting and the fundamental premise. For the opening scene I had a cabin on a mountain, a big meadow, vultures flying around, and a formless, faceless male protagonist. I even had this specific image of a vulture flying low overhead: what the guy sees is its shadow, a big dark form coming at him too fast. This happens to me every now and then, and it can be startling. I thought, what if he overreacts to the buzzard-shadow, has a moment of serious fight-or-flight before he realizes what it is? Say he has a reason to expect an attack; something, someone is hunting him. He has suffered some trauma, has done something terrible, and now he’s jumpy as hell because he’s hiding from the consequences. But he kind of likes the vulture spooking him, he sees the humor in it. He’s wry, tough, generous. Rice Moore just took off from there.

  Bearskin: A Novel Cover ImageMPS: I found the crime you mainly deal with, bear poaching, horrifying because I hadn’t heard about it. What made you choose it as the crime to propel your narrative?

  JM: Actually it was the crime itself that sparked the narrative in the first place. In the summer of 1994, I was about to start at a creative writing program, and my cousin told me this story about poachers leaving mutilated bear carcasses in the woods near where we grew up. I did some research and found out about the black market, the use of bear parts in traditional medicine and cuisine, the money that poachers could make back then. I wondered what might happen if you caught bear poachers on your property. For my first workshop piece in the writing program, I turned in the beginning of a story—eventually a novel—built on the basic idea that hasn’t changed since: protagonist finds bear carcasses, tangles with poachers.

  MPS: The book is set in Appalachia. Besides familiarity, what makes it a good setting for you to use as a writer?

  JM: I set Bearskin in a fictional county in eastern Appalachia, on the very edge of the region, a place where you can find demographic and ecological mixtures, striking contrasts—there’s a lot of inherent conflict there and that makes for a rich setting. Wild forests shading into open agricultural land and woodlots, bears coming off the mountain to raid exurbanists’ bird feeders, rich and impoverished people in close daily contact. In a Wal-Mart you could easily see a poor but proud mountain family in line behind a lean-limbed horse person whose wardrobe sold on eBay would feed the mountain family for months. These folks come from different dimensions, and you’d find very different stuff in their shopping carts, but there they are sharing the same physical space, usually acting friendly, but the gulf of privilege is breathtaking. In my book, the sociological edge effects show up in different ways. For example, the nature preserve where Rice works is owned by a rich family’s charitable foundation, and there are a lot of blue collar neighbors who resent the exclusion, the very idea of preservation, of removing natural resources from the local economy. Rice Moore is from the outside, from Arizona, and he’s caught in the middle. He has a job to do as caretaker, and he has developed real affection for this amazing forested mountain property under his care, but he also has sympathy for the locals’ perspective. Naturally, he gets in trouble.

  MPS: What do think the biggest misconception of the place is?

  JM: Probably that it’s homogeneous, and that all the people there are like the characters in Deliverance…or, to use a more contemporary stereotype, that the entire region is deeply depressed and everyone’s laid off from the coal mines and hooked on meth and oxy and black tar heroin. There certainly is a lot of that, and in the more depressed parts of the region I gather those things are indeed tragically prevalent. But Appalachia encompasses a large geographic area, including some mid-sized cities, and twenty-some million people live there.

  MPS: As a debut author, did you pull from any authors who inspired you?

  JM: Debut author indeed, but I’ve been writing for decades, and a complete list of inspiring authors would be impossibly long! Among contemporary writers, I’m probably most inspired by Cormac McCarthy, though as I’ve said elsewhere, you really can’t try to write like he does. Also Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, Rick Bass, Edward Abbey. More recently, Tana French and Kem Nunn. I probably pull from nonfiction just as much, from writers who help me deep-dive into the aspects of life most important to me: Paul Shepard, Barry Lopez, Charles Bowden, David Quammen…there are so many.

  MPS: Is there another novel you have lined up in the future?

  JM: I’m working on two right now, both related to Bearskin. The first, set in the Southwest, focuses on a brother and sister, estranged for years and brought together by a dangerous inheritance. Rice Moore and his girlfriend Apryl Whitson—this is a couple of years before the events of Bearskin—appear in the final third of the book. The second novel I’m working on is a sequel to Bearskin, and I’m still in the fun stage of sketching out possibilities for that one.

• Lit Reactor - https://litreactor.com/columns/bearskin-a-fast-read-20-years-in-the-making

  Bearskin: A Fast Read 20 Years in the Making
  COLUMN BY JAMES A. MCLAUGHLIN JUNE 12, 2018 2 COMMENTS
  IN: CHARACTER RESEARCH REWRITING

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  When I was twenty-eight years old, I quit a perfectly good job as an associate at a law firm to "become a writer.” Kind of early for a mid-life crisis, but a writer is what I’d always wanted to be, and life was passing by so quickly. I was nearly thirty years old, for god’s sake. I drove around out west for a couple of months, then returned to Virginia, took a part-time legal job, and started applying to graduate writing programs.

  A year or so later, I was about to start at the University of Virginia, scratching around for something to write about for the first workshop, when my cousin told me about a hitchhiker he’d picked up on a back road in the mountains of western Virginia. Apparently the guy made his living gathering things like ginseng and whatever mushrooms were in season, so he spent a lot of time walking around in the backcountry, and he told my cousin he’d been finding bear carcasses left out in the woods. The carcasses had been mutilated, their paws cut off and the gallbladders removed.

  I’d never heard of this sort of poaching. When I looked into it, I found the mushroom picker had stumbled on the local fringe of a global phenomenon: bears all over the world were being killed and their gallbladders and paws sold on the black market, mostly exported to southern and eastern Asia for use in traditional medicine and cuisine. I learned bear paws are a delicacy in certain cultures, a prized and prestigious dish—the front paws are supposedly more tender than the back paws, but all four get eaten. The other thing people are after is the bile in the bears’ gallbladders, which has been used for a couple thousand years to treat various disorders.

  There may not have been a quicker way to do it, exactly, but I do hope the next book’s gestation period will be a bit shorter.
  By the mid-nineties, Asian bear species had become extremely rare, and around that time, somebody noticed there are a lot of bears in the United States—hundreds of thousands of them—all with perfectly good paws and gallbladders. So what the mushroom picker was seeing in the mountains—all those mutilated bear carcasses—was the result of a sudden spike in demand: black marketeers were paying poachers a few hundred bucks for a set of paws and a gallbladder, which they would then export to Asia and make a ten-fold or better profit. Given those margins, it was hardly surprising that various organized crime organizations had moved into the bear parts market.

  All of which struck me as a rich backdrop for fiction. I started wondering what you would do if you found bear carcasses on your property, and what might happen if you encountered these profit-motivated poachers. That turned into the opening scene of a story for my first workshop at UVA, which I kept extending in subsequent workshops until it had to be a novel. I finished Bearskin 1.0 for my MFA thesis, but it was kind of an obvious first novel. The main character was named Billy, and Billy was a lot like me; i.e., he was boring, and the book was not interesting to agents or editors. I suppose I was trying to write to some vague idea of a “literary” novel, where any action or thrilling elements were just a little bit tongue-in-cheek.

  I set that version aside and worked on another novel; I wrote essays and stories. I worked as a lawyer part-time. My wife and I moved out west. I was able to publish a few short pieces here and there. I joined a friend who had started a small business in land conservation. I wandered around in the mountains with our dog, telling myself I was gathering wisdom and experience.

  Then, about ten years ago, a friend suggested I go back to Bearskin and try again. I decided to give it a month of work, see what happened. I stripped the novel down to the only elements that were any good: the mountain, the bears, the poaching. I threw out the main characters and came up with a completely new protagonist, someone with a past, someone who could be dangerous. The shell of the original novel was like an elaborate dollhouse: all the furniture was in place, and I knew where everything was. When I dropped new characters in, they developed quickly. I finished the first few chapters and decided they could stand alone as a long story. The Missouri Review published it as a novella in 2008.

  Thanks to that publication and later winning TMR’s Peden Prize, I had a handful of emails from agents and editors asking if there was a novel. Almost all of the old book was unusable because the new characters were so different, but I still had that shell, and I was curious about what would happen to Rice Moore. I decided to pick up at the end of the story and keep going, to extend the novella into a novel. Shouldn’t take long. Ha!

  One complicating factor was I had to keep updating the research. A lot of time had passed, and my plot had become more complex, so I had to keep diving into entirely new rabbit holes. A backstory in southern Arizona meant I got to visit the border country. I read books about old growth forests, Mexican cartels, snipers, gunfighting. I found a few experts on things like herpetology and federal law enforcement and emailed them questions. And not having been in a fight since grade school (my record was 1-1-1), I worried about my ability to depict violence realistically. I took lessons in Muay Thai and Krav Maga, which was fun as hell but led to rotator cuff surgery.

  Finally, in 2014, I sent a new draft to the folks who had contacted me after the TMR publication, but once again, nobody liked it. I revised for another year and lucked into Kirby Kim, my fantastic agent. Another year of revisions followed. Then we found the amazing Zack Wagman and Ecco/HarperCollins. Another few months of revisions and presto: a fifty-four year old’s debut novel. Twenty-plus years of writing, revising, letting it sit, then rewriting and re-revising…there may not have been a quicker way to do it, exactly, but I do hope the next book’s gestation period will be a bit shorter.

  Image of Bearskin: A Novel
  Bearskin: A Novel
  Author: James A McLaughlin
  Price: $16.85
  Publisher: Ecco (2018)
  Binding: Hardcover, 352 pages

  James A. McLaughlin
  Column by James A. McLaughlin
  James A. McLaughlin is a native of Virginia who lives with his wife and large dogs in a canyon east of Salt Lake City, Utah. He holds law and MFA degrees from the University of Virginia. His essays and fiction have appeared in The Missouri Review, River Teeth, and elsewhere. His novel Bearskin is available from Ecco/HarperCollins. He’s currently working on two novels related to Bearskin and set in Virginia and the American Southwest. James is an amateur photographer whose interests include wildlife, landscape, and human ecology. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications including Virginia Wildlife, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and The Missouri Review. His writing and photography can be found on the internet at jamesamclaughlin.com and on Instagram @jamesamcl37.

7/31/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Bearskin
Jane Murphy
Booklist.
114.17 (May 1, 2018): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Bearskin.
By James A. McLaughlin.
June 2018.352p. Ecco, $26.99 (9780062742797): ebook, $12.99 (9780062742810).
Native Virginian McLaughlin has set his debut novel in the state's rugged Appalachian forestland, which is
as haunting and precarious as the story itself. Bears are being baited and killed on a private land preserve,
and its caretaker, Rice Moore, becomes obsessed with catching the poachers, which leads him into serious
conflict with the locals, who feel they are entitled to roam the property at will. Unfortunately, after both
regional and federal law-enforcement agencies become involved, and Moore's former Arizona connections
to a Mexican drug cartel are revealed, the caretaker finds himself in a dangerous position on multiple fronts.
Moore's character is artfully revealed through flashbacks to what really went down in Arizona and through
his interaction with biological researcher Sarah Birkeland. The landscape is rendered in remarkable prose
that puts the reader right out on the trail with Moore in his ghillie suit, often lost in a Castaneda-like rapture
that contrasts sharply with intermittent bursts of stunning brutality. C. J. Box and Paul Doiron fans will
enjoy this edgy tale, with human greed and wildlife exploitation at its heart.--Jane Murphy
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Murphy, Jane. "Bearskin." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 20. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647183/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8c1e2e63.
Accessed 1 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539647183
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McLaughlin, James A.: BEARSKIN
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
McLaughlin, James A. BEARSKIN Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $26.99 6, 12 ISBN: 978-0-06-
274279-7
A fugitive from a Mexican cartel takes refuge in a forest preserve in the wilds of Virginia.
Rice Moore, the troubled protagonist of this hard-edged thriller, can best be described as remote, a
characteristic he shares with his hazardous surroundings. He's taken a job, under a false name, as the
caretaker for a family-owned nature preserve in the Appalachian Mountains. It's a slim chance for him to
escape his past, one that includes a gig as a drug mule for the Sinoloa cartel, the torture, rape, and murder of
his girlfriend, and a long stint in a prison in Nogales, where he trained as a sicario--a most hostile killer of
men. Rice is a dangerous man, one bound to surprise the bullies, hunters, and motorcycle gangs that roam
these mountains. In a very Billy Jack way, he soon runs afoul of all manner of local threats, among them the
police, a suspicious neighbor, and a band of predators who have been killing the mountain's bears, removing
paws and gallbladders for black-market sale in Asia. Rice also takes offense when he learns that his
predecessor, a biologist named Sara Birkeland, was viciously assaulted and raped during her tenure as
caretaker. It's a violent, compelling story that uses its milieu to incredible effect. Eventually we find Rice
stalking the land in a ghillie suit, blinded by visions, waiting for the kill--a patience that comes in handy
when he later finds himself in a desperate showdown, fighting for his life against the past that has come
baying for his blood. Told in spare prose and portraying the authentic mechanics of hunting, combat, and
psychological defense, the novel dares the reader to root for this damaged antihero but convinces us that
he's worth it.
An intense, visceral debut equal to the best that country noir has to offer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"McLaughlin, James A.: BEARSKIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294119/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=59e76ffe.
Accessed 1 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294119
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BEARSKIN
Mari Carlson
BookPage.
(June 2018): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
BEARSKIN
By James A. McLaughlin
Ecco $26.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780062742797 Audio, eBook available
Part thriller, part crime novel, part dreamscape, James A. McLaughlin's Bearskin refuses to be contained.
The bears on the Appalachian nature preserve overseen by Rice Moore, the novel's on-the-run main
character, need protection from hunters--much like Rice. He is used to being alone and operating outside the
law, having fled from a drug cartel in Arizona. Rice is thankful for a break from the guns and violence of
drug-running, but the bear poaching he encounters in his mountain refuge might be more than he can
handle--and he finds help in the most unlikely of suspects.
The book begins with Rice's prison sentence in Arizona and traces his tumultuous journey from
confinement to hard-won freedom. Rice is employed to survey and maintain the Appalachian preserve, but
the discovery of bear carcasses--as well as the story of the previous caretaker's tragic departure--trigger in
Rice a desire for revenge. In homemade camouflage, Rice spends more and more time on the mountain,
watching for bear hunters and becoming like a bear himself. Wonderfully lucid prose in the climactic
middle section starkly conveys Rice's descent into a wild existence: "Hysteria fluttered like a moth in the
back of his throat." When Rice is attacked, the previous caretaker and other mountain people--including an
ex-soldier turned criminal, a locksmith, a reclusive beekeeper and hillbilly brothers working their way into a
nefarious biker gang--play their parts to bring about old-fashioned justice.
Smart and sophisticated, with animals both wild and domestic acting as metaphors, Bearskin is a gritty,
down-home tale told with brute force. Rice is a memorable, reluctant hero for both his community and the
animals in his charge.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Carlson, Mari. "BEARSKIN." BookPage, June 2018, p. 20. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540052006/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4628b738.
Accessed 1 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540052006
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Bearskin
Publishers Weekly.
265.17 (Apr. 23, 2018): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Bearskin
James A. McLaughlin. Ecco, $26.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-06-274279-7
As taut as a crossbow and as sharp as an arrowhead, McLaughlin's debut unfolds in the Appalachian
wilderness of Virginia, a landscape whose heart of darkness pulses viscerally through its characters. Rice
Moore is working as a biologist caretaker at the vast Turk Mountain Preserve when he discovers that
poachers are killing bears to sell their organs on overseas drug markets. Rice's efforts to curtail their
activities antagonizes locals who raped the last caretaker and left her for dead, and--worse--it alerts agents
of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, from which Rice has been fleeing for reasons revealed gradually, to his
whereabouts. McLaughlin skillfully depicts Rice, revealing quirks and peculiarities of his personality that
show how "his hold on what he'd always believed was right and what was wrong had grown fatigued,
eventually warping to fit the contours of the world he inhabited"--a disconcerting revelation that helps
establish the suspenseful feeling that anything can happen. Rice's story builds toward violent confrontations
with the poachers, the cartel, and nature itself. The novel's denouement, a smoothly orchestrated confluence
of the greater and lesser subplots, plays out against a tempest-tossed natural setting whose intrinsic beauty
and roughness provide the perfect context for the story's volatile events. This is a thrilling, thoroughly
satisfying debut. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bearskin." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 60. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532865/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=376755a0.
Accessed 1 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532865

Murphy, Jane. "Bearskin." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647183/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 1 Aug. 2018. "McLaughlin, James A.: BEARSKIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294119/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 1 Aug. 2018. Carlson, Mari. "BEARSKIN." BookPage, June 2018, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540052006/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 1 Aug. 2018. "Bearskin." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 60. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532865/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 1 Aug. 2018.

• USA Today
  https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2018/06/13/4-new-mysteries-guaranteed-heat-up-your-summer-anthony-horowitz-bearskin-cara-black/692091002/
  Word count: 168

  Bearskin

  By James A. McLaughlin

  Ecco, 352 pp.

  ★★★½

  3.5 stars

  “Environmentalist fiction” sounds like such a drearily earnest genre. Recently, however, major novelists (Annie Proulx, Richard Powers) have been taking it in exciting new directions. "Bearskin," a powerful and often profound debut of the same caliber by James A. McLaughlin, weaves its story into the eternal, vulnerable mystery of the wild. McLaughlin’s hero, Rice Moore, is the keeper of a Virginia nature preserve, and glad of the privacy – for reasons not wholly his fault, a cartel is after him. Then, though, he starts finding bear carcasses, and is forced out of his solitude to determine whether it’s the mischief of local bikers (there’s a black market trade in the animals’ gallbladders and paws, it emerges) or something scarier. From these basic materials, "Bearskin"constructs a riveting narrative, set within a natural world that, should it vanish, McLaughlin suggests, might take part of us with it.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/books/review/james-mclaughlin-bearskin.html
  Word count: 388

  CRIME

  Bears and Poets: Endangered Prey in This Week’s Crime Column
  Image
  CreditPablo Amargo
  By Marilyn Stasio
  June 22, 2018

  As crimes go, cruelty to animals makes my blood boil, a sentiment evidently shared by James A. McLaughlin, the author of BEARSKIN (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99). Terrible things are done to bears in this gruesomely gorgeous debut novel about an imperfect hero who redeems himself by taking up the cause of these noble, if terrifying, beasts. Rice Moore is a man with a criminal past that he hopes won’t follow him into the 7,000-acre Turk Mountain Preserve in rural Virginia, where he has recently been hired as caretaker. But poachers are killing black bears so they can sell the paws and gallbladders (delicacies in certain cuisines), forcing Rice to interact with rough mountain men who hunt whatever looks edible and field-dress their kills when the meat has stopped moving but is still warm. Given a choice, he’d rather be in the company of bears, whose “complex social network” interests him more than the dynamics in the local bar.

  Following Rice on his forays into the woods, where he senses a benign “presence,” is like walking into the forest primeval. A naturalist to the core, he liberates a hive of bees, feels bad when he has to kill a copperhead snake and fusses over the fate of microbats. Happily, he has no such qualms when it comes to dealing with the Stiller brothers, sullen “gangster wannabes, small-time pot dealers and oxy slingers” who give “redneck” a bad name. There are times, he figures, when it’s necessary to unleash “the violent part of himself.”

  McLaughlin writes about the natural world with casual lyricism and un-self-conscious joy, while describing physical violence so vividly you want to look away. (“I wish you hadn’t told me about that fella’s face,” someone says after one particularly grim anecdote, about a man who informed on a Sinaloan drug cartel.) But McLaughlin is just as remarkable when he turns to other subjects, like the lost lover who “wore her hair in a thick black braid, a magnificent thing that just now rested on her left shoulder like a sleeping mamba.” That’s the kind of writing that makes me shiver.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/deep-in-the-heart-of-virginia-its-man-vs-bear/2018/06/15/86bec8d2-57a1-11e8-8836-a4a123c359ab_story.html?utm_term=.4f1ef0752487
  Word count: 893

  Books Review
  Deep in the heart of Virginia, it’s man vs. bear
  By Dennis Drabelle
  June 18
  What deer are to Washington, D.C., bears are to Asheville, N.C. During our 2½ years here in Southern Appalachia, my partner and I have seen nary a deer, not even while hiking in the nearby Pisgah National Forest. We’ve seen dozens of bears, though — some in our own yard, a little over a mile from Asheville City Hall. May 12 of this year was a four-bear day; we banged pots and pans to shoo them away.

  “Bearskin,” by James A. McLaughlin (Ecco)
  James A. McLaughlin has set his exciting first novel not far from us, in the mountains of southwestern Virginia, but his characters do not consider bears nuisances. In fact, some of the locals in “Bearskin” hunt the animals for profit. Shortly after becoming caretaker of the privately owned Turk Mountain Preserve, McLaughlin’s protagonist, Rice Moore, discovers bear carcasses denuded of their skins and missing their gallbladders. A helpful neighbor explains that “the mafia . . . pay two thousand dollars for one gall, grind up the gall salt and sell it to the Chinese for medicine.”

  Rice is no great upholder of the law in general — he has come to Virginia fresh from a stint as a mule for a drug cartel straddling the Arizona-Mexico border. Nonetheless, he is fiercely protective of his new territory, all the more so because his immediate predecessor, a young woman, was raped during her tenure as caretaker. While trying to catch the poacher, Rice meets resistance from the locals because of whom he works for: “wealthy outsiders” who own Turk Mountain and seek to impose a “nonsensical and elitist” preservation ethic on its users.

  [A deliciously dark tale of paranoia and consumerism run amok]

  Another complication looms. Rice is pretty sure the cartel will be coming after him, for reasons that are revealed in stages, as he flashes back to his time in Arizona. To be on the safe side in Virginia, he goes by a pseudonym, says little about his past and fortifies his on-site cabin as stoutly as his budget will allow.

  Rice’s situation — the stickling intruder bent on curtailing the freedom of action customarily enjoyed by denizens of a backwater — may be nothing new to readers of suspense fiction, but Rice himself is full of surprises. I’ve already noted the contrast between his shady past and his righteous present. He also engages in an extraordinary form of woodcraft: making himself a “ghillie suit,” a camouflaging outfit woven from grass, branches and cotton.

  Most oddly, Rice accepts an offer of magic mushrooms at a time when he needs all of his wits. (As the author acknowledges in an understatement, “Rice was unclear exactly how the shrooms were going to help him find the bear poacher.”) Traditionally, when a hero copes with blurred vision and rebellious limbs, it’s because he’s been slipped a Mickey by a dame. But here’s Rice, exponentially increasing the danger to himself by willingly ingesting psychedelics. As a result, he suffers serious bodily harm and has no idea how his opponent fared. Which suggests a new reason to just say no — if you indulge, you won’t know whether you can truthfully say, “You should’ve seen the other guy.”

  The author James A. McLaughlin (Nancy Assaf McLaughlin)
  Rice’s behavior may not always compute, and keeping track of his partially told sagas — what happened in Arizona, what happened after the mushrooms took effect, what’s happening right now on Turk Mountain — can be a chore. Holding the book together is Rice’s passion for the natural world. He conjures up a scene from his time in the Sonoran Desert, where he gazed up at saguaro cactuses by the thousands, “tall, humanoid, resigned, holding up their arms . . . it looked like the people who lived in [Tucson] had climbed up on the hills and were just standing there watching, waiting for the end of the world.” And in Virginia he watches two ravens circle above him, “quorking to each other, glinting like chips of obsidian in the sunlight.” Rice seldom leaves his Turk Mountain cabin without encountering some new and marvelous feature of the wilderness around him.

  [The 10 best thrillers and mysteries of 2017]

  “Bearskin”comes into its own in the last hundred pages, by which time all the backstories have been told and the cartel’s hit man has reached the preserve. Like a slow-motion cinematographer, McLaughlin skillfully breaks down the actions of hunter and hunted into their constituent parts. And anyone who has ever scratched his head at the sight of soldiers in camouflage riding the Washington Metro (what do they think they’re blending in with?) will appreciate the moment when the coming dawn changes Rice’s ghillie suit from protective cover to attention-getting anomaly.

  “Bearskin,” then, may call for a little patience from the reader. But stick with the novel and you’ll be rewarded with some of the best action writing in recent fiction.

  Dennis Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of Book World.

  BEARSKIN
  By James A. McLaughlin

  Ecco. 343 pp. $26.99

• Entertainment Weekly
  http://ew.com/books/2018/06/18/bearskin-book-review/
  Word count: 583

  EW REVIEWS
  Man becomes wild in the hypnotic thriller Bearskin: EW review

  Ecco
  placeholder
  DAVID CANFIELD
  June 18, 2018 at 02:20 PM EDT
  Bearskin
  TYPEBookGENREThrillerPUBLISHEREccoPAGES340PUBLICATION DATE06/12/18AUTHORJames A. McLaughlinWE GAVE IT A
  B
  In the first chapter of Bearskin, the accomplished and evocative debut of James A. McLaughlin, we meet a man on the run named Rice, living alone as a protector in the depths of the Appalachian landscape, battling swarms of bees and locking eyes with careening vultures. A shaggy mountain man with an indecipherably thick twang wanders onto his property, begging for water; Rice obliges, only to find his visitor with an ulterior motive: a discovery to reveal. Rice is guided through the forest, the air smelling of “hot rock” with “fence lizards skittered into dry leaves,” until he reaches their destination: the site of a bear carcass, one of “more’n a dozen” that the mountain man has seen scattered around. Rice stares at the dead animal — “struck by the human resemblance.”

  Atmosphere, as its opening so impeccably indicates, is everything in Bearskin. This is not exactly the page-turning thriller so overstuffed with twists it leaves you dizzy by page 100. It’s a slow-burn by design, a tale of suspense that reels you in through McLaughlin’s scrupulous skill. There’s no escaping the mountainous isolation enveloping Rice, and as the novel pushes forward and stakes a claim in richer psychological territory, there’s no escaping the man’s tortured mind, either.

  Rice, we learn first via an ambiguous prologue and then gradually as McLaughlin doles out details, worked as a mule for a brutal drug cartel and was trained as a hired killer in prison. The past’s haunting echoes turn too loud for Rice to ignore, particularly in the wake of his discovery of the conspiracy behind the dead bears — poachers killing and stripping them, selling off their organs to Asian drug markets — and the traumatic history of his predecessor, a biologist named Sara Birkeland. So begins a revenge saga, sufficiently propelled by one man’s animalistic instincts.

  Ostensibly a character study, Bearskin is most satisfying as a philosophical investigation of man and nature, washed in noir. Various, seemingly unrelated subplots creep their way into the book, and McLaughlin struggles to feign genuine interest in the mechanics of the drug world and its history with Rice; in the realm of exposition, the story flattens. It’s all in service, at least, of a less conventional and infinitely more intriguing novel. Rice and his harshly beautiful surroundings fuse into one; he dreams of snakes slithering, wanders in a bloodthirsty haze like the bears dying off, succumbs to the forces of severe hunger. “Rice, for his part, had turned predatory,” goes one compelling passage. “He’d been hungry for days, but now, like the wolf in a cartoon, he began sorting the animals he encountered according to their delectability.”

  McLaughlin ties the story together nicely, too, in Bearskin’s final pages, and imbues them with ghostly undertones. The conclusion, muted as it is, feels gorgeously fitting: the sight of a man turning away from humanity and embracing the wild. The book could learn a lesson from that climactic moment; it’d be better off without its most familiar beats, its reverting to genre expectations. But when its imagery, so stark and often poetic, takes center stage, Bearskin is elegiac, hypnotic — unshakable. B

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