Novels by Dave Carty
Red is the Fastest Color (2024)
In a hard and unforgiving land, forgiving is the hardest act of all.
Jamison Everett has a modest pension, an apartment in Minneapolis, and money in the bank. But Jamison longs for friendship. When his ailing sister, Monna Van Hollen, calls him from Montana and invites him to live with her and her husband, Ben, Jamison packs his few possessions and heads west to the Van Hollen’s farm, a mile from a small town as far from nowhere as he has ever been.
Monna, a painter, has Parkinson’s disease, and Jamison wants to help any way he can. But Jamison soon learns that Ben, a fiercely proud man, doesn’t want his help, and resents him for offering it.
Distraught and lonely, Jamison attempts to befriend a huge, half-wild yellow cat that lives in the woodpile, coaxing it ever closer to the warmth of his small cabin with cans of cat food he buys at the town’s only grocery store. But his efforts are put on hold when Monna’s health precipitously declines, and Ben, in despair, turns to Jamison for solace. Their friendship will be tested in the days to come. But Monna alone knows what the future holds.
Leaves on Frozen Ground (2019)
The first draft of Leaves On Frozen Ground was completed several years ago. The impetus was my familiarity with the back country bordering the south shore of Lake Superior. I buy my dogs from a good friend who lives in that area, and every year I spend a couple weeks in the very north end of Wisconsin, just south of Duluth. It is a wild and achingly beautiful land. I don’t remember if any particular incident launched my desire to write the book; but I distinctly remember thinking that the woods and hills around the hamlet of Bayfield, Wisconsin, would be a wonderful setting for a novel. Bayfield would eventually become Port Landing, and Lake Superior would become the backdrop for my story.
Fiction writing is, for me, a process of discovery, akin to knowing your destination but not having a map showing the way to get there. Because I know I need to write ideas down or risk having them disappear forever, there were days when the scribbled notes on the yellow legal pad I keep beside my computer were more voluminous than the actual text I was putting on the screen.
Much of Edmund’s exploratory hikes through the woods of northern Wisconsin were based on my own solo hikes through the woodlots of rural southern Iowa at roughly the same age. Life was far simpler in the mid to late sixties when I was a boy, and perhaps I had a subconscious desire to return. I was concerned that the story, set in a rural area, would seem quaint in this increasingly urban world, but it seems to have resonated with many readers.