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 ccp 006Shoot the Buffalo (a novel) by Matt Briggs 515 pp. isbn-10: 0-9723234-7-3 $14.95
The summer Aldous Bohm turns nine, his parents move to the woods near Snoqualmie, Washington, "to reinvent the American family." The Bohm's are working class hippies in post-Vietnam America. Their makeshift paradise takes shape in a haze of pot smoke and good intentions and ultimately births a vortex of personal insecurity and idealism that takes the family deeper into the woods and destroys them. Aldous oversees these tragedies, recalled a decade later, after he has left Snoqualmie to join the military in the build up to the Gulf War. Sweeping in scope yet unerringly precise in its detail, Shoot the Buffalo conjoins the dead end narrative of American masculinity with its stubborn twin—the Romantic ideal of nature—to suggest an ambivalent way forward, a path out of these woods. Not since Ken Kesey has a long-form literary work subjected the utopian outsider traditions of the North American west coast to such an intimate and clear-eyed scrutiny. Praise for the work of Matt Briggs: "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out." —Ann Powers, The New York Times Book Review "An auspicious debut volume for 29-year-old Matt Briggs, whose sharp-eyed yet sympathetic vision of life in the overgrown, semi-rural backwaters of the Pacific Northwest puts him somewhere on the spectrum that leads from Raymond Carver to Kurt Cobain." —Andrew O'Hehir, Salon "Dodging the picturesque, postcard version of our region, the Northwest Briggs brings to his readers is at once stark and lush...Seattle author Briggs gets to the emotional core of his characters by showing us how in tune they are with the landscapes actually surrounding them, rather than those we idealize." —The Seattle Times "Briggs's enormous and uncommon talent is for crafting fiction technically bold and psychologically daring, highly styled and deeply human." —Christopher Frizzelle, The Stranger
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