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Charlie Krueger has problems. His older brother has died in the killing fields of Europe, his father is a mean drunk, and the girl he planned to marry has just dumped him for a better financial prospect. As if that wasn't enough bad luck, when he leaves the family farm for good, he happens across an odd man standing in a field in the moonlight. Though Charlie soon forgets that encounter, the man, who had just finished burying Charlie's unfaithful girlfriend in a shallow grave, does not. The Windmill Man, as he calls himself, is on a mission. When he looks at the endless seas of grain stretching across the Dakotas, he sees desecration: "For hundreds of miles in every direction, he knew, it was the same: the land of the buffalo, the land of the cowboy, the land of the billowing prairie grasses all torn up, leveled, plowed, planted, and plucked. God's prairie had been beaten into a money factory. It was more than just wrong; it was obscene. Sooner or later, he was absolutely certain, both God and the earth would have their revenge. But until that day he preserved some semblance of balance in the universe. He watered the ground with blood." Charlie joins a threshing operation, one of many steam-powered harvesting operations that have sprung up after wartime government subsidies made wheat farming lucrative and agriculture a big business. Charlie finds he has a knack for tending steam engines, a talent he hones as he works with an anarchic crew that has formed a ramshackle family around a threshing machine. When the girl's body is discovered and Charlie realizes he's wanted for murder, it's this impromptu family that has his back. Thompson, whose Fiddle Game was shortlisted for a Debut Dagger award and who was awarded the Minnesota Book Award for this novel, has created a vivid picture of a brief time after World War I, when industrialization changed the northern plains, creating ephemeral communities around the feeding of giant threshing machines. It's a fascinating snapshot of a little-known moment in our past, and the figure of the Windmill Man, while in some respects a standard creepy serial killer, is also a Cassandra, warning of the consequences of industrial farming practices. § Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, May 2012
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