Patrick Barron

Circling Brooks: Transmogrifications Patrick Barron

Circling Brooks is a work of social and natural historical fiction, magic realism and zoomorphism, which depicts modern human society in the wilderness. In addition to narrating entertaining adventures, it questions stereotypic and personified descriptions of the landscape. Rather than merely recount human-projected thoughts and designs upon the earth, the book portrays the land shaping and, in somewhat wild form(s), literally transforming humans. It plays with the multifarious possibilities of the unleashed power of the land upon humanity. The novel is an account of many inter-linking journeys in the rough style of the epic. The nexus of all action is the re-invented village of Brooks, located on the north coast of Alaska between Barrow and Point Hope. From Brooks the characters wander across north central Alaska, the Yukon Territory, and eastern Siberia. Their paths wind south; cross, combine, split, and eventually curve back north to complete a mosaic of circling trails. Along the way these protagonists meet with many wild incidents and side-characters, including surly bears with grudges, an enraged cuckold, ghosts of dead caribou, projected vision through animal eyes, a maniacal captain of an illegal whaling ship, racist cult-missionaries, a whining phantom of a dead snowshoe hare, and their own persistent dreams.