THE GOPHER KING

Bull River Falls, Colorado, population 875, is experiencing a summer of discontent, with raging forest fires, strangely aggressive wildlife, the Gold Gulch Corporation’s controversial expansion of its ski resort and golf course, and the mysterious gunshot death of a young woman. Surveying it all is Stan Przewalski, the 60-something editor of the Beacon-News, but he’s an unreliable observer. His psychiatric meds barely control his nightmares about Vietnam, which bleed into hallucinatory daytime flashbacks, and he’s alive only because the rope that he recently hanged himself with broke. He takes it in stride when he meets Chaz, a gopher who, thanks to exposure to radioactive testing, can outthink and outtalk most humans and magically shrink large objects—including Stan—down to his foot-long scale. Hallucination or not, Chaz deeply resonates with Stan’s past: He loves 1960s rock and has organized his fellow gophers into an army with miniaturized attack helicopters and fighter jets. Nikolich’s fanciful scenario makes up most of this meandering novel, which consists mainly of Stan wrestling with his Vietnam demons while taking in Chaz’s diminutive parody of human culture and warfare. Stan occasionally joins the gophers’ attacks on Gold Gulch, which is trying to drive them off their land. The resulting yarn is imaginative and often beguiling, like a mashup of Platoon and Gremlins scripted by William S. Burroughs. But it is also awkwardly dissonant, with the gophers’ cartoon antics—“They then synced the upstairs elevator door alarms to the hospital PA system, which had already been programmed by a team of prairie dog sound engineers to play a continuous loop of Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Woodstock rendition of the Star Spangled Banner”—clashing tonally with Stan’s pitch-black memories of combat. (“I was covered with blood….I walked up to the first one and took his head off. I emptied half the ammo belt into that bunch.”) Many scenes clearly take place in Stan’s dreams or imagination and therefore feel inconsequential and uninvolving. Still, the author is a gifted writer, and when he looks outside Stan’s head—“The old woman and the horse faced into the wind and together they watched the smoke rise and hang in gauzy white sheets above the valley”—his prose is entrancing.

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