cover image Strange Cowboy: 
Lincoln Dahl Turns Five

Strange Cowboy: Lincoln Dahl Turns Five

Sam Michel. Tyrant (Consortium, dist.), $15 trade paper (262p) ISBN 978-0-9850235-1-5

In Michel’s stylistic new novel (after Big Dogs and Flyboys), Lincoln Dahl, a young father of introspective and hilariously fragile nature is in something of a psychic retreat from the relationships that define his life. He’s distant with his son of the same name (“Your pictures look real good there, on the fridge”), fears his dying mother (“I have resolved to call her nothing, if not something on the lines of Mother”), and yielding to his impatient wife (“My wife believed she was the secret we were born desiring to recover”). But amid preparations for the younger Lincoln’s fifth birthday party, the elder Lincoln promises, in a desperate attempt at fatherliness, to tell the story of his own fifth birthday. But instead his speech—and thoughts—become a fount of meditations on life, death, the terror of relationships, and all that confronts someone on the verge of conscious personhood. Eventually, the death of a dog named Hope forces father Lincoln to spend an unprecedented amount of alone time with his son. Though the novel consists of little story, it is funny, tender, thoughtful, and strange. But the real selling point is Michel’s breakthrough prose. (Nov.)