Walk Me to the Distance

By: Percival Everett

Narrated by: Jared Zeus

Haunting, provocative and bleakly funny, Walk Me to the Distance is Percival Everett's brilliant reexamination of the Western, and a laconic tragicomedy about what it takes to survive in the last days of a bygone big-sky country.

In self-imposed exile after returning home from the war in Vietnam, David Larson meanders into the barren town of Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where a local widow takes him under her wing. After making a sort of home among the town's hardscrabble locals, David grudgingly adopts a young Vietnamese girl abandoned along the highway. This sets in motion a set of tragic turns as Western mythos and frontier justice clash against the tides of a changing world.

First published in 1985 by Clarion Books, Walk Me to the Distance was the sophomore novel of an iconic American voice. Over the course of his five decade career, Everett has written over twenty five books and been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize (for 2020's Telephone), twice longlisted for the Booker Prize, and the recipient of the 2024 National Book Award for the "genius" (the Atlantic) James, a brilliantly imagined retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. James was a #1 New York Times bestseller and is being developed into film by Stephen Spielberg.

©1985 Percival Everett (P)1985 Tantor Media

I Didn’t Like the Story, But Was I Suppose?

I’ve read a lot of Percival Everett’ books. He is a master storyteller! I feel like a fly on the wall observing everything without being noticed. I find it interesting how he can capture the lives of people in an areas of the country that I know nothing about. With this story I almost stopped reading it several times due to the degrees of violence that I found disturbing. Yet I still wanted to know what was going to happen to the people he has chosen to write about, often people whose personalities I found appalling and shallow. I also felt like there was some left out details that I was looking for that were never explained. I will leave my comments to those observations so that readers can discover their own details without me spoiling the story. That is the magic of a well written story, this ability to take the reader to places they didn’t expect to go, making you care and feel about people you’ll never know, no matter how uncomfortable their situations are. Observing life from all perspectives even our flaws is the sign of the possibilities of the growth of humanity. Percival is a national treasure. I hope more and more people discover his more than 25 publications.

Home

This story deviates from Everett’s other stories with less focus on race and more about a different characters and cultures creating connections.
The strength and frailty of living and belonging in a world of instability and conflict and deviance that exists within and outside of a person is explored through vivid and subtle imagery.

Another good listen from Everett

I always enjoy his books and this one was no exception. It was such an original story with strong, unique and interesting characters in setting highly recommend

Slow and depressing

Story moves slowly from one sad situation to the next. Simply Not for me or anyone looking for a fun entertaining story.