New from CIRQUE PRESS Partly inspired by the Louis L'Amour novels scattered through the bunkhouses, the novel
Loggers Don't Make Love takes place in a logging camp on Washington State's, Olympic Peninsula. The tall tale explores the interplay of camaraderie, friendship, love and sex, and pays tribute to the itinerant workers who found honor in harvesting the last old growth timber still legal to log. It was a blood sport, providing a stage for big egos, some of them twisted, far from the centers of good manners. Like commercial fishermen and miners, loggers found nobility in doing a job that other people didn't want to admit was necessary. Of course, the women they pursued could see through the bluster. Grisdale, the logging camp, was billed as the last real camp in the lower 48 until it closed and disappeared in 1985. The book's title may be read as words of advice.
Loggers Don't Make Love, a stunning debut novella by a former NW logger, Dave Rowan, defies a literary pigeon-hole. Glorious first-growth NW forests-wild and free and lovely-seep their wildness and more into the loggers who harvest them in the US '70s, and the women who love them. Throw in a murder mystery and you have a feast that is good-to-the-last-surprising-drop.
-Kerry Dean Feldman, author of
Alice's Trading Post: A Novel of the West and
Drunk on Love: Twelve Stories to Savor Responsibly.
LOGGERS DON'T MAKE LOVE Dave Rowan Cirque Press (193 pp.)
Kirkus Review 2022
In Rowan's short novel, a young logger recalls a past murder and a search for answers. Ed "Knucklehead" Knockle is an angry young man and a fighter who decides, in 1975, to take a job at the logging outfit where his father died in a mysterious accident, before Ed was born. (The book consists of Ed's recording of these happenings a quarter-century later while on a trip back to the Olympic Peninsula.) His first day on the job, Ed becomes bunkmates with Bob Smith, another newbie, a huge, taciturn Iowan. Readers meet other characters, such as Crank, the boss, and, later, a scary hooktender named Spike Larue. Readers also get a glimpse of a daily grind that would break most men. Ed and Bob survive their first week, though, and become true loggers and fast friends. Then comes new secretary Ruby Faulk; she and Ed become friends, and she and Bob become lovers; later, she breaks it off with Bob, who's devastated. After a Thanksgiving break, the men come back to camp, where Ruby's found stabbed to death, and Spike's knife, which he often flaunted, is found beside her body. A dramatic and scary climax leads to a resolution of the mysteries surrounding Ruby as well as Ed's father. Rowan was himself a logger on the peninsula for almost a decade, so he clearly knows the life in his bones. He immerses readers in the logger vocabulary (tailhold, choker, skyline, crummy, yarder, gut-hammer), and each chapter begins with an uncredited pen-and-ink sketch showing a scene from the logging life. It's effectively revealed to be a hard, dangerous, dirty, and ill-paid existence, but it's also one in which these skilled men take pride, as it's evident that most guys would not last a day in their shoes. Overall, the plot is largely believable except for a final twist that many readers may find gratuitous. A generally engaging labor of love with details that truly immerse readers in its characters' work. EXCERPTING POLICIES Please review Kirkus Media's excerpting policies before publishing any portion of this review online or in print fo
