Come fly fish with me

Really.

No.

Not really.

Read a book. A book that said, on it's very well-done, barbed wire and trouble kind of cover - "A Fly Fishing Mystery"



The last thing I want to read about, I thought, besides Paris Hilton's social agenda, is a book about fly fishing.

I put it on the bottom of the stack of books to be read.

And, of course, it's the read of the stack.

Except for Bowker's newest book, maybe my read of the summer. What is this book?

The Blood Knot by John Galligan


It's hard-boiled fly fishing. Maybe noir fly fishing. Not sure of the sub-sub-genre to reign it in with.

But it isn't dry, mechanical boring fly fishing.

This book grabbed, yanked, hauled me in with the first page.

Galligan writes about The Dog, a character living on the fringes in a place where the fringes are unknotted, frayed and libel to trip you up if you dare to walk across them. He's living there by choice, knowing he'll move on to a possibly more out there place soon enough.

He started out thinking he was on a fishing trip.

He didn't know what was going to happen next and neither did I.

Let me share:

"There are two types of rabies: mad rabies and dumb rabies. The labels are perfectly descriptive. You snap, unprovoked, at everything, or you drool at nothing, or you do them in sequence, like entree and dessert. It all depends on the mechanism chosen by the Rhabdo virus to effect what will become, either way, your total cerebral derangement and horrible death.

Hence, this introduction to the quality of my thinking on that chilly September morning, in the moments before I found the Barn Lady’s soggy, bullet-riddled body in the West Fork of the Kickapoo River.

My brain was doing this: If one is prone to both snapping and drooling---at everything and nothing, simultaneously---and these symptoms have persisted since long before the beaver bite---say, since a certain unforgivableble disaster in one’s past---then one is in the clear.

One cannot have rabies.

Right?

One can't."

Somehow, The Dog has to stay afloat in chaos peopled by amorous Amish, back country bullies and the occasional well intentioned cop.

And then, The Dog knows; this is not a fishing trip.