Pufahl embraces noir’s mood while weaving in a love story. Her style, so rooted in symbol and lyricism, can make her characters sometimes speak as if they were prophets on a whiskey bender.Pufahl is so committed to the spell she’s casting that her characters’ voices fall under it too. That sense of unreality can sometimes make Pufahl’s dialogue ungainly. Metaphors run so thickly over Pufahl’s story that the novel reads as much like a prose-poem commentary on the ’50s as a realistic novel set in it. Just as important, Pufahl’s prose can run with those icons and at times surpass them. She admires the genre’s blend of high and low culture, its sharp-elbowed sentences and neon-lit imagery, its vision of hard-luck off-the-grid lives. Pufahl.is plainly a fan of the fiercest noirs to come out of the postwar era. And her keenest observations are about the secrets we keep. But it does it so skillfully - Pufahl’s prose is consistently lyrical and deeply observant. It’s practically axiomatic that every story set in 1950s America must be a critique of its squeaky-clean surfaces. In Shannon Pufahl’s engrossing, melancholy debut novel, On Swift Horses, California feels both scrubbed new and thick with storm clouds.
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