Ruby Ridge

I was inspired to search out Jess Walter's Ruby Ridge (1995) after seeing him as one of the the talking heads in a documentary about the Oklahoma City bombing on Netflix. This is a strange tale about a very misguided family that sees the government as a threat and in this story the government made some poor choices that would make them the target for subsequent terrorist attacks. The remote wilderness of the Northwest has always attracted people living on the fringes of society who have unusual and aberrant beliefs. I had already discovered Walter as an accomplished novelist (Citizen Vince, etc.) from my hometown of Spokane, Washington-however, I was not familiar with is journalism. I knew that he wrote for The Spokesman Review, but this was my first exposure to his nonfiction writing, but I can see how it informed his fiction. Walter is very good at describing people and settings as well as recreating people's conversations. His reporting here is very thorough and detailed. I suspect writing this book gave him the confidence to write his first novel.