Then Came the Evening

A Novel

By Brian Hart

An unflinchingly, gorgeously written literary debut from a writer earning comparisons to Cormac McCarthy

Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding in the road.

Eighteen years later, Bandy's son -- a stranger bearing his name -- returns to the town, where the memory of his father's crime still hangs thick. When an accident brings the family -- paroled father, widowed mother, injured son -- back together, the three must confront their past, and struggle against their fate.

Like a traditional Greek tragedy, suffused with the mud, ice, and rock of the raw Idaho landscape, Then Came the Evening is tautly plotted and emotionally complex -- a stunning debut.

Reviews for Then Came the Evening:

Brian Hart's Then Came The Evening reviewed in the March 14 New York Times Book Review.

"All the elements are in place for an inspirational, heartland-America redemption story, but Hart taps into his characters' fears with gritty lyricism and noirish repartee that subvert any feel-good temptations."—New York Times Book Review.

"Like the characters in this quietly exceptional début novel, the author is an Idaho native, and an astute observer of the transitional Western landscape."—New Yorker. See full review.

THEN CAME THE EVENING review in USA Today.

"This novel's finely detailed episodes of physical and emotional violence bring to mind the works of Larry Brown, while its lyrical descriptions speak of landscape and rural community life like the books of Robert Morgan. Hart explores, with brutal honesty and a delicate respect for the strength of the individual spirit, the human needs for love, for continuity after death, and for redemption. His depiction of the effects of poverty, violence, and drugs on the human spirit is acute and poignant."—Booklist

"Every family has issues, but in Brian Hart’s debut novel, he takes family drama to a new extreme with characters who are weighted with baggage. The story begins when Vietnam veteran Bandy Dorner awakes drunk and disheveled one morning and finds his home burned to the ground. In a fit of anger and confusion, Bandy kills a police officer because he thinks his wife Iona was lost to the flames, when she in fact ran off with a new lover, and he ends up in prison. The novel fast-forwards to 1990 when Bandy’s 18-year-old son Tracy, who was conceived shortly before the fire, visits his father in prison and attempts to rebuild a broken relationship while also refurbishing Bandy’s deceased parent’s home. The two fully reunite upon Bandy’s release, and Iona rejoins the family as well, causing friction and endless fighting while the family endures the countless trials of mending the past, and each character questions whether they are actually meant to be together. “The rugged Idaho backdrop adds sometimes stark, sometimes beautiful counterpoints to the stripped-to-the-bone narrative,” says Publishers Weekly. “Most impressive is Hart's ability to conjure rich and conflicted characters in an uncommon situation; his handling of the material is sublime.”—The Daily Beast

“Say one thing for first-time novelist Brian Hart: He sets himself a challenge right out of the box. The challenge is Vietnam veteran Bandy Dorner, one tormented character in a novel filled with damaged souls trying to live with loss, guilt and bone-deep sorrow. We know that Bandy is doomed from the moment he sets foot on the page, and we know that whatever he suffered in the war, nothing justifies the murderous rage that slaps him in prison as the novel opens. But Hart, fulfilling the promise he showed in 2005 when he won the Keene Prize, the largest student-writing prize in the world, still manages to make us care about Bandy and the others. We hope against hope that they can redeem something from their shattered lives…Hart deftly probes the dynamics of family, asking whether blood ties can overcome disastrous choices, but the novelist resists any easy spiritual rebirth for his characters.”—Dallas Morning News

“Hart constructs a taut drama around the attempt of these three wounded characters to build something out of the wreckage of their lives. Hart could hardly have chosen a more unsympathetic trio, characters perpetually down on their luck in part because of misfortunes that they can’t control, but mostly because of ill-considered choices that they make. And yet Hart earns the reader’s attention to them, if not always sympathy for them, in large part through the beauty and simplicity of his rhythmic prose, his natural dialogue, and his elegant evocations of the landscape and portrayals of how the characters’ shifting identities fit into the evolving town. It takes a rare writer to be able to convince a reader to follow a group of bad-news characters to such bleak places, but Brian Hart’s prose makes the story enjoyable, even when the events it describes are not. In Then Came The Evening, Hart has achieved a consistency of tone, a concision of description, and an intensity of focus that make for a satisfying drama.”—New West