Books book reviews Journeys and Destinations: On Mark Z. Danielewski’s Tom’s Crossing Danielewski takes the skeleton of a pulp Western plot and turns it into an epic meditation on friendship, horses, and the nature of mythology itself. By Tobias Carroll | Published on December 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share What, exactly, is Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel Tom’s Crossing about?  One way to answer that question is to ask the marketing department. Something you might notice if you have a copy of Tom’s Crossing in front of you, as I do, is that its copy is surprisingly minimal. The back cover has a blurb from Stephen King and the ominous line “NO ONE TALKS TO THE DEAD FOR FREE.” The jacket has a little more information: that the book is about “two friends determined to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter.” This is accurate enough, but it’s also a little like saying that Moby-Dick is about a fishing trip. There’s a character in this book named Melville; I cannot imagine any writer, much less one as aware of narrative history as Danielewski, doing that as anything other than a way to acknowledge the white whale in the room. There’s another answer that comes to mind that reflects a wholly unrelated creative work: the influential Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Specifically, an oft-misquoted piece of dialogue from near the end of that film: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Tom’s Crossing, set largely in Utah, is a novel that’s very concerned with all of those things: the West, facts, legends, and the way facts and legends can become one another. It would be accurate to say that Danielewski’s novel is also about the way legends begin and how they grow. Tom’s Crossing is also about horses. More accurately, it’s about the peculiar way that horses and humans can bond; simply by virtue of existing, it has already become part of a bizarre equine Transcendentalist canon, situated somewhere near Mike Oldfield’s song “On Horseback.” It’s a Western, and it’s a quest novel, and it’s a ghost story. And while it’s arguable that it can be read as a deconstruction of any or all of these things, what stands out for me about Tom’s Crossing is its lack of anything remotely resembling ironic distance. From the outside, this looks like a monolithic postmodern work of experimental literature. What you have inside is, in fact, a completely sincere and often sentimental adventure story. There is nothing cool about this book. I enjoyed it tremendously. It’s been years since I first read the work of Mark Z. Danielewski. That came, predictably, through his novel House of Leaves, a novel that one could convincingly argue is one of the most influential works of fiction of the last 25 years. Nestled narratives, ambiguous storytelling, and typographic experimentation are just some of the things found within. It’s a work steeped in horror with enough formal inventiveness to chart its own literary path. I have not read much of Danielewski since, in part because despite my warm feelings about House of Leaves, it also terrified me in a way nothing else has done since then. Details: at one point reading it, in a room in my apartment with the door closed, I realized that I was no longer sure that the rest of the apartment was on the other side of the door. The best writing can change the way you see the world; this left me feeling like my brain had been hacked, that I was now seeing the world in a manner similar to the perspective of Danielewski’s most existentially fraught, horrifyingly paranoid character. The tricky thing is that that same skill at using prose to rewire a reader’s brain comes in handy here. Right about here I need to tip my hat to Alexander Sorondo’s massive exploration of Danielewski’s life and art, which includes a detailed look at Danielewski’s five-volume The Familiar and its efforts to echo certain Prestige TV narrative beats within the context of an expansive novel. There’s a similar approach used to very different ends in Tom’s Crossing. It is not remotely hard to imagine a version of this novel that’s one-sixth the size, and yet Danielewski opts for a maximalist approach. He uses devices here to make quotidian moments seem heroic and heroic moments seem truly epic. In other words, this is a novel that needs to get you on its wavelength. Here’s a brief summary of what readers can expect from this book: Tom’s Crossing begins by telling the story of two high school-aged friends, Kalin and Tom. It’s 1982 and the two boys are living in the town of Orvop, Utah. They have grown fond of a pair of horses, Navidad and Mouse, who live on the property of a local business owner nicknamed “Old Porch” and who are at perpetual risk of being slaughtered. Tom dies, and on his deathbed asks Kalin to free the two horses. Kalin embarks on a quest to lead them through the wilderness to an area where they can run wild. He’s joined by Tom’s ghost and, eventually, Tom’s younger sister Landry. Old Porch and his sons pursue them, weapons in tow and ill will in their hearts. People die along the way.  There’s something unexpected about the way Danielewski approaches this most archetypal of stories. The title page declares that the author is “E.L.M.,” and that it was transcribed by an unknown party. It also clarifies something in an especially bold font: “A Western.” The opening paragraph of Tom’s Crossing does not name any of the major characters mentioned; by its third paragraph, Danielewski introduces Rayleen Roundy, a woman trying her best to paint a scene that’s become familiar to her. Danielewski names several more characters in rapid succession. If you’re expecting Rayleen to become a significant character going forward, you would be incorrect. From the outset, he’s making something very clear: This isn’t just a novel about the events it describes; instead, it’s about how those events will resonate over the years that followed. Alternately: Kalin’s mother Allison works at a movie theater, and there’s one scene set there where two films are alluded to but not named. One is E.T.; the other is Rambo: First Blood. Both have, since the time of their release, become borderline myths of their own. It’s telling that Danielewski mentions both films here; one could argue that, if those two books are a spectrum of sorts, this novel is situated equally from both poles. Danielewski can also be very specific when he wants to be. He does include some proper names of musicians and movies at various points over the course of this story. A handful of writers also come up in Tom’s Crossing, and it’s interesting that one of the ones named in the book is Ben Okri. Arguably Okri’s most famous novel is The Famished Road, whose protagonist is a boy with one foot in the world of the living and another in the world of the spirits. That description could also apply to Tom’s Crossing’s Kalin, who spends much of the novel talking to his dead friend, who only he can perceive. Tom isn’t the only ghost to show up here, however. At one crucial point in the journey, the spirit of a deceased Indigenous woman named Pia Isan joins the traveling party—but only Tom is able to perceive her. This sets up a parallel structure, where communication between all of the members of this traveling quartet is impossible, and Tom and Kalin must each act as go-betweens. That the party consists of two white men and two women of color also seems significant: This is, after all, a novel where Mormonism is omnipresent, set just four years after the Mormon Church broke with its existing policies and allowed Black men equal standing in the religion. There is an entire afterlife cosmology alluded to in pieces here. Despite being a ghost, Tom himself is unsure of what all of the properties of ghostdom are. Some of the most jarring moments within the novel come from Tom shifting between a familiar friend to Kalin and a being that appears to have lost some essential qualities, including large chunks of his memory. There’s a sentimental component to this journey, two dear friends on one last adventure — but Danielewski never lets us forget that there’s something else happening as well. That right there is the darkness of a ghost’s mind. That there is Tom, darkness and distance incarnate, beholden to forces beyond the reach of calculation, not to mention speculation, the ne plus ultra past which all returns are rendered impossible. Or, to put it more simply: to dare close enuf to know Tom’s thoughts would be to lose irrevocably our own. There are a few more uncanny elements of Tom’s Crossing. There’s a recurring motif that involves Kalin’s mother warning him to avoid using a gun, except that this is less a warning and more of a curse. To reveal how exactly this element plays out over the course of the novel would be to spoil too much, but it wouldn’t go too far to indicate that this is foreshadowing: not just Chekhov’s gun, but Chekhov’s gun with accompanying curse. This is, after all, a Western.  Buy the Book Tom’s Crossing Mark Z. Danielewski Buy Book Tom's Crossing Mark Z. Danielewski Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget One of the other recurring devices in Danielewski’s novel are the points where the narrative pauses and Danielewski briefly introduces characters who, years after these events, find themselves inspired by them to debate their veracity or create art depicting their interpretations of certain scenes. The years in which these events take place stretch on past 2025; they also often reveal the fates of these minor characters, mortality and all. There is at least one very science fictional demise found in this text; this may be a Western, but it also has space to mention death by robot. This is a review of Tom’s Crossing, and as such it’s worth addressing the sheer scope of this novel. And here I’m at a disadvantage: Like many books of this size—especially Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, which this book is very similar to in some ways and radically different from in others—many of the risks it takes pay off as long as you’re willing to accept that the narrative approach justifies the scope. In Moore’s case, that was giving the city of Northampton an epic all its own; here, it’s the way Danielewski takes the skeleton of a pulp Western plot and turns it into an epic meditation on friendship, horses, and the nature of mythology itself. But Tom’s Crossing is an understandably daunting read. This is a big, dense, ambitious book that does a few structural things that have no business working—including one cliffhanger moment late in the novel which is followed by a seemingly random interlude about what appears to be a wholly unrelated character. Danielewski is juggling a lot of narrative balls here, and while they do pay off, readers will need to sign on for the long haul. Essentially, it’s a perpetual motion machine: The payoff comes from the anticipation building and building. This all does go somewhere eventually; even one subplot that seemed to be completely unrelated turned out to have a very good reason for existing. Readers will find many references to The Iliad in Tom’s Crossing. (Also characters named Melville and Bilbo; Danielewski is not shy about some of the terrain he’s crossing here.) And maybe that, in the end, is what Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel Tom’s Crossing is about: showing us how a story that’s become the stuff of myth got its start, and where to find the human connection at the heart of it.[end-mark] Tom’s Crossing is published by Pantheon. The post Journeys and Destinations: On Mark Z. Danielewski’s <i>Tom’s Crossing</i> appeared first on Reactor.