Powderhorn

By: Joseph McInerny

Narrated by: Evan Schmitt, Dana Rizzo

Meet Horton Moon, a street-wise (if improvident) family man trying to get by as best he can in Depression-era Minneapolis. Beside the hard times, Moon does battle with his own demons: A fickle heart, a taste for the drink, and a bad habit of slipping rather too easily from one side of the law to the other. When he meets a remarkable young girl newly arrived in the city from the Dakota plains, Moon falls in love and falls off the edge. His marriage disintegrates, he loses his job and his bearings, and he steps into a dark underworld of crime and retribution.

©2013 Joseph McInerny (P)2022 Joseph McInerny

Horton Moon is Everyman!

Joe McInerny’s protagonist is a kind of iconic American from a time in the Twentieth Century when the world was in the process of falling apart. We meet him in his late twenties. Already the father of four children with one on the way. It’s the thirties and mid-depression. McInerny describes Horton’s journey as if he, himself, had lived during those times. We never see the research—it all seems so effortless in its spare elegance. McInerny never judges his flawed hero. He calls on us to find compassion for him and we do.

haunting and thoughtful

This novel his both haunting and thoughtful. Horton Moon is sympathetic and terrifying as a lead character. The plot is very evocative of the depression upper midwest, but also has an ending set much later, which made me think of the histories that older people around us hold and maybe hide. I loved it as a read novel and now I love it as an audiobook. Good narrative performances too. Love the the two different voices.