Book Passage of the Week – from Hold the Dark, by William Giraldi

I’m digging the prose in Hold the Dark, about an ailing old man who helps a grieving mother track down the wolf that killed her son in a remote Alaskan village.

He’d seen his daughter only once in the last three years, when she came home the morning after her mother’s stroke. Three crawling years. Life was not short, as people insisted on saying. He’d quit cigarettes and whiskey just before she was born. He wanted to be in health for her and knew then that ten years clipped from his life by drink and smoke were ten years too many. Now he knew those were the worthless years anyway, the silver decade of life, a once-wide vista shrunk to a keyhole. Not all silver shines. As of this morning he had plans to return to cigarettes and whiskey both. He regretted not buying them at the airport.

Chinese New Year (the world ends at Midnight)

Midnight he woke up to the end of the world.

He shot up and made his way to the window. A flashing silver band belted around the village and soft pops and loud pops and other sounds like a giant popping his knuckles and elsewhere high whines seared the night, silenced in claps sudden and brutal and final. The noise died down. A few scattered remains. Then silence reclaimed the night for at least another year.