Big Stone: A novel

During a hunting trip in Northeastern South Dakota on Halloween in the early 1980s, Karl Jameson, a self-employed house painter in his thirties, strikes a pedestrian, a Native American named Leonard Hardkill, and, out of fear, leaves his ten-year-old son, Aaron, with him. Leonard tries to abandon Aaron when he meets up with friends who are on a mission to dispose of something (a dead body, presumably), but Aaron is not easily left behind and manages to stow away in the back of their pickup truck. Aaron\u27s mother, Martha, grows suspicious after receiving a message on her answering machine from a stranger telling her that her husband and son will not be coming home. Karl had paid the man to make the call, being too afraid to make the call himself. Martha and Karl, separately, set out to find the boy. Action and dialogue are reported through a shifting third-person-limited narrator. The characters repeatedly comment on storytelling through the narratives they construct around each other\u27s words, actions, and unknown motivations. They are not heroic in the traditional sense: no one tries to transcend human limitations. Temptations to succumb to racial, gendered, and anthropocentric master narratives are resisted