Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, the setting of Maxim Loskutoff’s astonishing debut novel, is a real place. In RUTHIE FEAR, it comes alive on the page as a geography of beauty and desperation while the story follows the titular character over 25 years.

Life in Darby (a real Bitterroot Valley town with a population of just over 700 residents at the south end of the Valley) is slow and dangerous, yet lovely. Five-year-old Ruthie and her father, Rutherford, have lived alone in their run-down teal trailer since Ruthie’s mother left. Rutherford, having lost his job at the mill, scrambles to put food on the table and loves almost nothing more than hunting. One day, while exploring near No-Medicine Canyon, Ruthie sees a strange creature resembling a feathered, headless kidney lurching toward water. For years, she hopes to catch another glimpse of the thing, to prove its existence and to understand something more about the Valley and its mysteries. The beast proves elusive; all the while, Ruthie grows up hardscrabble and dreamy. 

"RUTHIE FEAR is a magnificent novel. Loskutoff’s prose is masterful, and his character-driven tale moves at an easy pace but is threaded with bloodshed and brutality."

Loskutoff jumps his story ahead in chunks of about five years. Young Ruthie is a girl of wonder but capable of striking out, a girl who believes in the scary headless creature as much as she believes in the possibility of peace and comfort in her mountain valley. As she grows up, though, she realizes that the menace around her is real. From poverty to violence, life in and around Darby is a struggle with little hope of relief. Still, she finds grace in the outdoors, in the animals and the landscape, and often it seems like just enough.

In high school, Ruthie watches her father’s loneliness age him. She dates Badger, a slow-witted and mostly kind football player. She grows to better understand the tensions that abound --- between the indigenous Salish and the colonizing whites, the poor locals and the rich newcomers, the children and the adults, and the men and the women. She is surrounded not only by threatening figures, from the local pervert to high school bullies, but thankfully also by figures of kindness and quiet strength --- like her father’s best friend, Terry French, and her own best friend, Pip Pascal.

Ruthie longs to leave Darby, but a short stint in Las Vegas has her wishing for the familiarity and the vistas of home. The arrival of ex-NFL player Jon Sitka brings another chance for love and happiness, and their romance is one of restraint and simmering pain. By the absolutely heart-stopping finale, Ruthie finds that the Valley has a way of tainting, literally and figuratively, everyone who lives there.

RUTHIE FEAR is a magnificent novel. Loskutoff’s prose is masterful, and his character-driven tale moves at an easy pace but is threaded with bloodshed and brutality. Throughout the Bitterroot Valley --- and as Ruthie continues to seek solace --- frustration, fear and sorrow manifest as violence and anger. Loskutoff allows the moments of tenderness in nature and humanity to hit readers like a sledgehammer. The end of the novel sprints toward a moralistic message but does so in a fantastical, almost surreal way.

In the Bitterroot Valley, like everywhere, the balance of nature is fragile, and worlds both internal and external hide terrible and splendid depths. Ruthie Fear is a proud, charming and compelling field guide to those depths.