Another powerful book from James Lee Burke. The setting in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana is rendered beautifully. Eighty-five-year-old Aaron Holland Broussard lives the story and tells it well, with descriptions and insights in language that is often both lovely and unsettling. The novel is powered by significant personal (parental) loss in the death of a daughter – a horrible experience suffered by both author and character – and the troubling trauma of a nation coming apart at the seams.

The poisonous energies splitting these seams include racism and white supremacy, an ignorance that is nationwide and best represented out in the world the novel reflects by fools for the Confederate flag and January 6 insurrectionists. The malignant energies of greed disguised as a defense of rights – fools for the 2nd Amendment, which was never intended to be used for gun-lust (a foolish and frightening swirl of gnawing fear and hunger for perceived power) – and of any religion based on exclusionist fervor and not on love of all (all means all, y’all).

All of these power grabs – racism, gun-lust, exclusionary religion – are deep infections in the past (and present) of the United States, and they are represented in the ghostly, spectral character of Eugene Baker, the military monster ultimately responsible for the Marias River Massacre on January 23, 1870. In Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, Baker is the scary representative of the US’s brutal past. The weak-minded – those without purpose or capacity for any thought or love that is unselfish, benevolent – fall under his spell and do his evil bidding. Ignorance is a vacuum into which he thunders. But to stand up to him – with clear and energetic thought, with love, with goodness – is to learn he is finally ineffectual, having no power other than – beyond what – we give him.