Gil Adamson’s book, The Outlander, took me by surprise. It was a recommended book at Powell’s bookstore, and I had heard that Adamson was by trade a poet. It brought to mind other books written by poets, the most famous of which was Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a sprawling, glacial eight-hundred pages. The Outlander clocked in at around three hundred and seventy pages, and I put off reading it for a few months. When I finally did sit down to read it, I expected a turgid, image driven book that suffered from a dearth of character. I was completely wrong.
The plot (a dirty word to most literati) is established in the first four paragraphs. The widow murdered her husband and she is running from her brother-in-laws—twin red heads that feel like they came straight from a Cormac McCarthy novel—who are hunting her: simple, straightforward, and spare. Once the broad strokes of the plot have been established, Adamson subtly fills in successively finer details in a way that doesn’t feel like she’s withholding critical information.
In many ways, this book has the immediacy of James Dickey’s (also a poet) Deliverance, the spare, diction driven prose of McCarthy’s The Road, and the hallucinatory nature of Mempo Giardinelli’s Sultry Moon. It’s a quick, rewarding read that is difficult to put down.