Hold the Dark: A Novel

William Giraldi is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Busy Monsters and is fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.

“[F]ierce, extraordinary.... An unnerving and intimate portrayal of nature gone awry. . . . Spectacularly violent and exquisitely written.”
- John Wilwol, New York Times Book Review

“A taut, muscular and often unforgettable journey into the heart of darkness. Epic, relentless, and beautifully realized.”
- Dennis Lehane , author of Mystic River

“A chilling, mysterious, and completely engaging novel that will keep readers turning pages late into the night. The cold and unforgiving Alaskan wild becomes much more than a backdrop for this spellbinding story. It becomes a character―a living creature with its own hungers, its own secrets, its own icy motives, its own implacable will. I was entranced.”
- Tim O'Brien

“Giraldi’s back-country Alaska is a savagely amoral place where the constant struggle for survival brings out the most elemental aspects of humanity. This work travels deep into the most ancient and primitive realms of being, offering an unflinching―and more than a little frightening―exploration of the domains of the unconscious that are more commonly the province of myth and fairy tale.”
- Library Journal, Starred review

“Maybe it all began with Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in 1938, but there is a variety of modern thriller, created these days by Robert Stone and Denis Johnson at their best, that delivers narrative thrust and beautifully composed sentences by the pageful even as it peels away the thin membrane that separates entertainment from art, and nature from civilization. Here’s Boston writer William Giraldi adding to the slender ranks of such masterly fiction... [Hold the Dark] certainly stands out as one of the decade’s best books of its kind, and one that deserves, because of its stylish flaunting of some of our darkest fears, a future readership.”
- Alan Cheuse, Boston Globe