cover image Four Dead Horses

Four Dead Horses

KT Sparks. Regal House, $16.95 trade paper (258p) ISBN 978-1-64603-066-8

In Sparks’s wildly offbeat debut, a Michigan man’s life is marked by the deaths of horses. Growing up in the small town of Pierre, Martin Oliphant doesn’t care much for horses, but his feelings change on the eve of his high school graduation in 1982, after he watches one drown at a resort on Lake Michigan. His father, a “small-time corporate raider,” takes over the financially ailing resort, allowing Martin’s social-climbing mother to create a tennis center for her friends and his brother Frank, a spoiled tennis protégé. After dropping out of the University of Chicago, the quixotic Martin writes for the local paper and dreams of traveling to Nevada to participate in the annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence. As the decades pass, Martin witnesses two more horses die, and in 2015 he takes over one of his dad’s companies to become a pet mortician. He continues putting off applying to perform at Elko, until a girlfriend pushes him: “You’re not idealistic. You’re lazy.” After a fourth horse dies and a fifth is endangered, Martin must find a way to blaze his own trail. Sparks makes the most of Martin’s obsession and the theme of pursuing the unattainable. This occasionally poignant and mostly wacky story is one Tom Robbins fans will want to take a look at. (Apr.)