Benjamin Whitmer (Pike) stands squarely in that "rural noir" sub-genre niche of tweakers and trigger-happy drunks worked so effectively by Larry Brown and Rick Gavin. Whitmer's Cry Father is an accomplished, swaggering tale of battered-but-still-striving men living in the no-man's land of southeast Colorado. It's a male-centric story of fathers and sons whose women are "merely" ex-wives, girlfriends, baby mamas and nursemaids. Nonetheless, Whitmer hardly needs them to tell his often-violent story of men hanging on to whatever slivers of redemption they can find.
Patterson Wells is an itinerant tree trimmer called in after tornadoes, floods and other natural disasters to clear power lines and occasionally pull bodies out of the debris. With his dog and a bottle of bourbon, he jumps in his truck to cash in on calamity wherever it turns up before sleepwalking home to his rudimentary cabin in the San Luis Valley. After his young son Justin's death from a botched surgery, the divorced Patterson clings precariously to the companionship of his dog, his still-sympathetic ex-wife and his neighbor Henry--a broke-down, recovering alcoholic and former rodeo bull rider. It's a life, but not much of one. When Henry's drug-running son Junior shows up from Denver to rail against the once-absent, abusive father he thinks screwed up his life, Patterson's marginally tolerable life takes a turn for the worse.
In a misguided attempt to protect Henry, Patterson gets sucked into Junior's fast and loose life, and in Junior's turbulent wake, Patterson learns to accept his own failings as a father, husband and friend. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.