Spokane novelist Jess Walter’s delightfully grim So Far Gone (Harper Collins, 2025) starts off one rainy night when an embittered recluse named Rhys Kinnick is suddenly confronted with two small children who show up unannounced on his doorstep. This is particularly surprising to Kinnick because he lives in the middle of nowhere — nowhere being well outside of Spokane, at the end of a long series of dirt roads, in an isolated cabin. It had been years since he had so much as spoken to another human being. How on earth did these kids find him? Why do they want to? And who are they?
This last question proves mortifying: The little girl and boy are his grandchildren, who he last remembered seeing seven years ago, on Thanksgiving, after fleeing his beloved daughter Bethany’s house in the wake of a fight with her husband Shane, who was an obsessive right-wing conspiracy theorist who practiced, in Kinnick’s words, “crazy eagle four-wheel-drive oppo-Christian patriotism” that ventured “ever further into the paranoid exurbs of American fundamentalism.”
Driving away from their home in a rage, he had taken out his iPhone and seen that Bethany had left him two voicemail messages. “He turned his iPhone over in his hand. Remarkable. Every human connection he had left was contained inside its miniature electronic circuitry…. [W]ithout this $600 Pop-Tart of modern science, he had no way of reaching any other human being, and they had no way of reaching him.” After a few more moments of perceptively meditating on this device, Kinnick throws it out the window…