Onyx reviews: Hell and Back by Craig Johnson

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 11/23/2022

At the end of Daughter of the Morning Star, Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire embarks on a seven-hour drive to track down more information about a group of white supremacists responsible for a rash of missing and murdered native women, including Jeannie One Moon. In Hell and Back, Walt regains consciousness after some unknown incident. He's injured and alone, and he's not in Wyoming any more. Were it not for the fact that his name is written in his hat, he wouldn't know his own name, and even with that evidence he can't be sure.

He discovers he's in Fort Pratt, Montana, a snowbound northern town with the remnants of a burned-out residential school on the outskirts and few remaining residents. Finding a missing persons poster in his pocket, his old instincts kick in despite his uncertainty about his name or nature. He wanders the town, encountering people who seem vaguely familiar, but he can't quite grasp the context in which he knows them. Some of them, he believes, may be dead, quite likely at his hands.

There is an increasing tendency in crime fiction to flirt with other genres (take, for example, Gabino Iglesias's The Devil Takes You Home and Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown), but the Longmire books have from the beginning embraced native mysticism. Longmire has long felt the presence of a gigantic human/spirit named Virgil, often seen in the guise of a bear, who has been both nemesis and assistant. Virgil is back, acting like his namesake from Dante's Divine Comedy, guiding Longmire through a time-traveling adventure that takes him to the night Fort Pratt’s Industrial Indian Boarding School burned on New Year's Eve in 1896, killing 31 children. Walt knows what will happen and is determined to change history. He is invisible to almost everyone in that time period, a kind of quasi-ghost who can, nevertheless, interact with physical objects.

The number 31 becomes a talisman throughout the novel. For example, it's the number of the room assigned to him at Fort Pratt's Baker Hotel. Eventually, Longmire realizes the time is always 8:17 PM regardless of where he is or when. Readers will wonder whether the sheriff is in some kind of purgatory or, like Walt himself wonders, whether he's dead or alive, sane or mad. Certain incidents begin to recur and Walt experiments with altering their outcome.

Complicating his mysterious mission are frequent encounters with the dangerous eater of worlds, a shapeshifting native spirit known as Éveohtsé-heómėse, aka "The Wandering Without," who feeds on death but has an aversion to metallic objects.

In other sections of the book, Walt's undersheriff and love interest, Victoria Moretti, and his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, travel to Montana to find out what happened to Walt. His truck has been demolished by a snowplow and there's blood in and around the wreck, but no sign of Walt. His two friends will go to any lengths to determine Walt's whereabouts and woe be to him who gets in the way.

Hell and Back, the 18th installment of the series, is probably not the best place for new readers to begin. It is heavily dependent on things that transpired in recent novels, and anyone picking up this novel without that foreknowledge will probably feel as disoriented as Walt does throughout most of the book. However, for longtime readers of the series, it is a fascinating, revolutionary look at a well-known character confronted with his mortality and the brutal life he has lived. As with the preceding book, it also provides an outsider's look at systematic and cultural injustices suffered by Native Americans.