Tom’s Crossing
Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski
Description via The StoryGraph:
While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines in mountains ready to shrug even the bravest from their backs, as one Orvop local would put, with another characterizing the astonishing journey as crazy as it was foolish as it still is just plain beyond imaginin. But them kids went for it anyway.
Not that such daring was entirely unexpected considering how some of those involved included the likes of young Tom Gatestone, already a bit of an Orvop legend, and his friend Kalin March, new to the area, the two of them taking it upon themselves to rescue a couple of neglected horses from the Porch paddocks on Willow and Oak.
Who knows what would have happened if they hadn’t?
For sure no one expected the dead to rise but they did. For sure no one expected the mountain to fall but it did. For sure no one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif to say nothing of Pillars Meadow.
As one Orvop high-school teacher would describe that extraordinary feat days before she died: Fer sure, no one expected Kalin March to tell Old Porch: You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards.
Read from January 1st through May 21st of 2026
I took my time reading this one and it’s now easily one of my favorite books of all time. As close to the ancient oral traditions that a modern written work can get, it’s also a book about a love for reading, and language, and rhythm. About time, and myth, and balance. About not necessarily moving on from trauma but trying to live well with it. This is a modern mythology, steeped in both the beauty of the natural world and the horrors of our history as a nation, society, and species, and the violence we enact upon not only each other, but Nature as well. An epic as vast and vibrant as it is harrowing, violent and breathless.
Tom’s Crossing isn’t just about kids and a ghost rescuing Horses. It's about the living and the dead and incomprehensible expanse that lies between. It’s about the deep and ancient places of the world just beyond the edge of our perception. Signifiers and the signified. Danielewski expands the boundaries of space and time to include and cradle even the most tertiary of lives—human and animal alike—into a story that, in some way or another, touches everything and everyone. Here is the interconnectivity of the human experience and how our own lives, no matter how seemingly trivial, have a broader effect on those around us, even if we cannot or will not understand.
Early on—if I were to try and comp it—I would have said it’s as though Stephen King were a James Joyce understudy—or maybe Melville would be more apt—that’s trying to write Cormac Mcarthy’s version of The Lord of the Rings (which I guess would just be The Dark Tower?) But now that it’s done—and I’m left in tears from the things it’s permanently etched upon me—I feel that would be a disservice to the incomprehensibly exceptional work Danielewski has done here. Tom’s Crossing is an incredibly original and wholly monumental feat of modern literature. It’s harrowing and emotional and about as dense and deep as a work can get.
Before this book, if you’d asked me to pick one book to reread on my deathbed, I couldn’t have chosen. That’s no longer true. I’ll gladly leave this world riding in such good company as these horses and their kids. Tom’s Crossing is a death-bed book.
I guess I’ll leave it at that, and end with the words of one Glendon Hoffman from up in Spanish Fork—then, feverish as all hell—paraphrasin Ben Okri:
“Beware of the stories you tell, because at night, beneath the surface of your wakefulness, they are alterin your world.”
P.S. Starting on the bottom of page 1128 and ending on 1129 you'll find probably one of my favorite paragraph-length sentences in history.
Standout Passages
It’s really hard to pick any one or two… or ten. It’s massive and full of wonderful prose so I’ll just put the three that really stick out to me the most.
“It ain't good enuf to wanna be free,” Kalin told her then, but in that way like all the embers he guarded deep in his heart to keep his life warm he was now givin over to her. “Every dang livin thing wants to be free. It's elemental I reckon. But like my momma taught me, and it's how I see things too: to matter you gotta set free someone that ain't you. That's all that matters.”
“Before he'd vanished completely, though, Landry realized that this hesitancy of form, what she'd have sworn to any jury was now his character and condition, had likewise vanished completely. Once again upon that black mare's back he was transformed, his every quality and action in concert with his circumstances and destination; as if whatever strength we all believe we store for such impossible challenges had in Kalin's case been emptied entirely from his keep, which he no longer had need for, because a greater power now possessed him requirin no reserves, no keep, only Navidad.”
“He wanted it to be so. And as was true for many, it weren't a hard leap given how his thoughts were so bound by the lore that would continue to resonate in the hearts and minds of locals, as well as those who lived well beyond the borders of Utah Valley, as somethin more than the mere actions of men and women, and children too, children with horses; how maybe a greater orderin of Justice does continue to move through all lives, whether we choose to believe so or not. No thought, however, on that bright June afternoon, was given to the poor beaver nor to the subsequent shudder that took hold of that hiker, despite the heat still in him from his climb, the heat still in the day, as if winter itself had briefly inhabited him, and just for holdin that casin between two fingers, a remnant and proof that human endeavors, no matter how executed and claimed, are still of little consequence betore the world at large that with every day grows more conflicted over whether to continue to issue yet another allotment of generational survival to such a proud and cruel species.”
“Yeah, I can do that sometimes. You see, you brought up how life in the Church leads to the sort of family you'd want to see reassembled in any afterlife. And as wholesome as that sounds, it has a way of sayin what kind of family's right, and in doin that, it refuses other kinds of livin, Good livin. From there it's just a matter of steps before this kind of preachin is just another means to acquirin power and writin laws retainin that power. Heedless too that them supposedly Good Families have by their lineage gone on to produce factions, sectarian violence, even armies set against one another, set against anythin Good. This here's the only kind of power I respect.”
Allison took in a deep breath and then lifted her eyes to take in the tall trees again and the towerin skies above.
“Trees remind me of the virtues of stillness and patience. I used to think stillness was a prison, but the stillness patience requires is not a prison where there is Love. And I do believe there is Love here. In the earth, in the sky, where life rises and even where it don't, I told Kalin that, but I'm sure he didn't hear me.
