Deer Season by Erin Flanagan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Deer Season by Erin Flanagan Joshua Doležal Erin Flanagan, Deer Season. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 320 pp. Paper, $21.95; e-book, $21.95. On the face of it Erin Flanagan’s debut novel, Deer Season, is a murder mystery. Peggy Ahern goes missing in Gunthrum, Nebraska, during hunting season. After her parents and the authorities suspect foul play, all fingers point toward Hal Bullard, a disabled farm hand reminiscent of Steinbeck’s Lennie Small. Alma Costagan, Hal’s employer and surrogate mother, is a Chicago transplant who has always been regarded with suspicion by Nebraska natives despite her contribution to the community as a bus driver. Alma’s protective instincts toward Hal, who works hard and parties hard and has a history of violence, only intensify her outsider status. As Stephen King suggests, a good story proceeds not from plot but from a compelling situation, and Alma finds herself in one hell of a pickle. The fact that Hal claims to have bagged his first deer the very weekend that Peggy vanished, and that he returns home with blood all over the bed of his truck, seems ominous indeed. But Alma’s [End Page 83] search for answers functions as a gateway into more substantial problems, such as ableism and misogyny in rural America. The novel also explores Alma’s heartache after a series of miscarriages, how these losses have chilled her marriage, and how the marriages of her neighbors also suffer in a sleepy community where husbands and wives cope with boredom by “sniffing around someone they shouldn’t” (42). The real depth of the narrative lies not in the whodunnits but in the vignettes. In the opening scene Alma wrestles with squealing hogs while her husband, Clyle, injects antibiotics into their necks. While the violence in the corral unmistakably foreshadows gore later in the narrative, Alma also reflects—between injections—on the tedium of menopause. As she does in two earlier collections of short fiction, Flanagan reveals the inner lives of her characters beneath the surface of otherwise ordinary moments. Peggy’s younger brother Milo, an angsty but thoughtful teenager, contributes more to the story through memory and observation than he does through his spoken words. While riding the school bus home one afternoon Milo confides in Alma that he has “prayed a ton” for his sister’s safety. Alma’s response, “I know that helps a lot of people,” shocks Milo speechless, and Flanagan draws out the texture of the moment: “They drove the next few miles in silence, but it wasn’t like the silence he had at home right now, where he moved through the kitchen without lifting his feet, sure any sound would shatter all of them. The grind of the gears, the crotchety noises of a cranky bus, the battery-powered radio Mrs. Costagan kept Velcroed to the dash so she could listen to AM radio—it wasn’t like silence at all” (51). Deer Season is set in 1985, but other than Milo playing Atari with his brothers, the “refinished basement phase [that] hit Gunthrum with a wall paneling vengeance” (122), and a few other retro allusions, the story might have taken place anytime in the last forty years. Alma’s judgments of small-mindedness in Gunthrum are rarely balanced by a broader historical context, such as the farm crisis, which might explain why native residents who had managed to save their family land would act coolly toward outsiders. However, Alma’s view does change significantly near [End Page 84] the end of the novel as she reflects that small communities, for all of their prejudices and narrow horizons, can be ideal support systems for people like Hal. In Gunthrum the “grocery store didn’t charge [Hal] for the fruit he dropped,” the police watched out for him, and the restaurants gently refused when he tried to leave too exorbitant a tip. “It had taken a lifetime to establish all that,” Alma reflects, “and . . . it was the good people of Gunthrum who made it possible” (254). Alma’s observation reveals a paradox that has always bedeviled rural America, no less today than in 1985: that small...