Reading List: Violence and Justice in Rural Spaces
As we persevere through what remains of the winter season, here is an invitation to let the lingering nights set the mood for darker tales exploring crime and violence in rural settings. Though the stories they tell of rural spaces are specific to the places in which these narratives unfold, all three works locate the capacity for violence not only in the unknowable minds of individuals, but also within communities who decide what counts as justice, who deserves absolution, and whose vulnerability is at least tacitly condoned.
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Sicangu Lakota) (HarperCollins, 2020)
In this debut crime thriller, Virgil Wounded Horse, an “Indian justice” practitioner for hire, races to uncover the source of heroin newly arrived on Rosebud Reservation. Though he finds in the “russet hills and rolling prairie” a kind of grace and uplift, Virgil is initially dismissive of Sicangu Lakota spiritual practices and scoffs at the notion of a “mystical bond with the rez,” seeing only poverty and crushing lack of opportunities. Equally absent is any sense of justice as the United States legal system leaves many crimes against Native people entirely unaddressed. In this context, Virgil’s vigilantism serves a purpose for his community. But as he gradually comes to understand the Lakota principle of repair rather than retribution, he realizes that justice depends on his ability to recognize first the sacred in his people and in himself.
Deer Season by Erin Flanagan (University of Nebraska Press, 2021)
The same weekend a local farmhand with a mental disability shoots his first deer, a neighboring teenage girl disappears, snarling the small town of Gunthrum, Nebraska, in gossip, accusations, and violence. Told from the alternating perspectives of two people who feel out of place in their home communities—Alma, a Chicago native married to a local farmer, and Milo, the missing girl’s younger brother who longs to escape his small town—the novel explores the intricacies of close-knit rural communities where paradoxically everyone knows each other’s “social security number and bra size” and yet even family members remain uncertain what their loved ones are capable of.
Dark Waters by Kristine Potter (Aperture, 2023)
Nashville-based photographer Kristine Potter’s monograph, “Dark Waters,” explores the menace of rural spaces in the American South through black-and-white landscapes of seemingly empty places and portraits of subjects in postures that suggest, but do not reveal, peril. This ambiguity evokes a sense of disquiet that permeates many of the images—in “The Cover-Up,” for instance, a disorienting array of foliage at first conceals but gradually leads the viewer to an ominously shaped bundle at the edge of a creek. Interspersed are lyrics of 19th and 20th century “murder ballads,” and so each landscape becomes a potential crime scene and each portrait a potential victim or perpetrator. These elements converge in a haunting exploration of the interactions between the imagined violence of southern gothic tradition and the real violence carried out in these rural landscapes.