Autobiographical observation: in my head, BtK occupies the mode of existence of a figure in dotted outline. In saying that, I don’t mean to summon the familiar crime scene imagery, though of course BtK was a killer, and was killed; I mean rather that my entire view of this person, when I consult my informational inventory, is dodgy, limited, filmy, see-through, etc. The cognitive scientist David Marr (1982) posited that visual object recognition proceeds in three stages, the first of which is a “primal sketch”, a mental representation consisting of a rough patchwork of edges and ends, a splotchy, sketchy array made of light discontinuities caught by the retina: my mental picture of BtK has been like that. Mostly structure, very little substance.

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He—BtK, that is—lacks the grandeur of certain mythical characters, but is, on the other hand, far too thin to fit in with the likes of the real historical figures I do know things about, whom I’m capable of thinking of as very distantly located people in the calcified regions of a shared, evolving world. BtK shows up to me rather as—to borrow a phrase used in the very different context of trope theory—a kind of abstract particular. By ‘abstract’, the trope theorists mean incomplete, and BtK does seem that; I find him as mostly white void and graphite borders, perhaps some crosshatching at the places bearing most narrative gravity. I hadn’t until recently known that there actually existed a real photograph of him, so even the more vivid sense of shifty, darting eyes I would encounter when calling him to mind was nothing more than imagination-spawn. To cognize the whole person in question, meanwhile, would be to entertain little more than a functional role, a body-shaped hole in spacetime, flitting about a few liminal wild-west locales before vanishing altogether.

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Anyway, this was my relation to Billy before I read Daybreak Birdsong. The novel led me scrupulously through the process of realizing him—of coming to perceive him as something in possession of genuine flesh, and as someone. The Billy I came to know, Ryder’s Billy, is taciturn, but has a lot to say in writing (a number of the very short chapters that compose the novel are presented as his own journal entries). He’s independent, relentless, and most of all, attentive. And, on a note struck perhaps more often than any other, he loves animals.

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Fauna appearing in Daybreak Birdsong (probably not comprehensive):

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mice, sparrows, wrens, owls, hens, horses, mules, foxes, warblers, catbirds, cormorants, gulls, doves, chickens, dung beetle, cricket, canary, geese, sparrows, turkeys, nighthawk, robins, vultures, duck, deer, grebe, heron, plover, dogs, coyotes, beetles, inchworms, ants, grasshoppers, fireflies, honeybees, bear, muskie, steelheads, eagles, jack-rabbit, buffalo, whip-poorwills, pocket mouse, cowbirds, javelinas, piglets, teal, elk, mayflies, wind-spiders, chimney swifts, nuthatch, ravens, cranes, scorpion, cow, ringtails, woodrats, weasels, goshawk, jackrabbit, weevils, antelopes, elk, grouse, parakeet, quails, herons, pronghorns, trout, buzzards

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We come to notice many of these through Billy’s own meticulous ornithological cataloguing, but many more are present just in the objective standpoint narration that characterizes the events of the novel when Billy himself isn’t telling us about what he’s up to. Thus we have a sense of Billy’s world expanding significantly beyond his person; a living, teeming world, populated with endless skirmishes and strategies, immeasurably many survival mechanisms driving forward the crackling ends of embattled evolutionary chains. Many of these we learn about in various encyclopedic intrusions concerning bird species, which invite the reader to identify resonances with Billy’s own experiences and qualities. Billy scavenges his world for data—you get the feeling he is doing so even when you can’t see him.

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Ryder’s BtK is himself a kind of human/animal chimera. He’s smaller than a normal man (hence, “the Kid”), due to a vexed birth, and suffers from scapular winging (“bird back”) and otapostasis (“bat ears”). In many ways he seems to be one of the birds he’s studying—hollow-boned, flighty, imbued with a disposition to sing songs that he likely cannot himself explain or understand. In ironic contrast to his dedicated naturalism, Billy’s mother is convinced that he is not her true son, but a kind of faerie imposter, the real Billy stolen from cradle by the “Wee Folk” and replaced with an undesirable of their own (note that this makes Billy a reject whichever tale is true). The first part of the book—which I found quite gripping, even though BtK is at that time still a kid, and the action hasn’t started yet—is all about this paranoia, which continues to haunt Billy far past his mother’s death. Ryder does superb work here in constructing a perspective on the part of Billy’s mother that’s eerie, obviously untrue, but also often sympathetic and sad. And the echoes of these tall tales in Billy’s later violent life are hard to ignore, even, eventually, for Billy himself.

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Situating BtK’s origins in a conceptual landscape of New England folktales and witchcraft also serves to subvert the abstract outline conception of his person: the novel situates him relative to a much older history, one spanning continents, and in so doing pulls him out of the wild-west portrait in which he’d been (in my limited representation) stranded. This sort of reorientation occurs in at least two more guises—one is the aforementioned locating of BtK in a naturalistic world of complicated fauna; the other is, when the story does get west, the portrayal of the place itself as much older than it typically might be, as populated by longstanding Native civilizations and all their own history. Also worth noting are the indigenous timetelling conventions Ryder chooses to use when occupying the objective standpoint: The Moon of Sleeping Bears, The Moon of Leaving Geese, The Moon of Dying Fires, The Moon of Hungry Crows, The Moon of Come Back Birds.

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Animals, one comes to feel, serve as intrinsic symbols in this world. It’s as if anything with a mind—including, metafictionally, you—can’t help but see them as such. But they are also, always, animals. And the land—the skies, the rivers, the dirt—is always land. Generally, Ryder seeks to walk a tightrope between the literary feel of associative symbolism and the interactive presence of things, most prominently living creatures. There is a density to many of the novel’s scenes, a feeling of weight, a rawness of sounds, a thickness to things seen—consider this standout passage:

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And then I hear it, hardly hear it at first: a far-off sort of hum. And soon louder and louder still, and I am thinking it must be from the big boats on the river, the low sad horns the way the Ferry boats headed for Brooklyn and back would do when they were coming in or going off. Something like that sound. But no. Not that sound. And then it comes full on, and—how can I tell it—the most terrible awful cries a body might hear. Moans, I tell you, screams and moans and louder still so I’m not hearing Mister William Antrim talking to Mam next to him, and not the tweeting of the birds in the trees, and not the rattling rows of bright green leaves of corn or whatever the hell it is growing and not even the clop clop of Finn in the road. And it comes into view across the river between the passing trees—cows and cows and cows packed in tight together inside long roads of fences, flowing in one great brown crowd of cows with no end to them, not that I can see, with no space between them but holding their heads and ears and horns above the clouds of dirt-brown dust, and I can only see their heads and not the rest of them so packed in they be. We are too far off to see their faces, but I do. I see their faces. I see their round eyes and black noses and some with their tongues swell-up and hanging out, and I don’t know how it is that I can see them but I do, I do, on and on until the lines of cows ten cows wide flow together into one big sea of cows, and they are crashing against the fences, and some climbing up the boards to get out, but there is nowhere to get out, nowhere else to go, and men sitting on the boards kicking and swinging bats at the cows trying to get away by climbing up the boards and the cows that won’t go, oh I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to, if she didn’t make me, but I had to, had to go, our Da was gone and Mam spitting blood and there was nowhere else to go, and we go on, on, Mister William Antrim flapping the reins telling Finn to keep on cluck cluck keep on now, and Finn taking us along the road where the sea of cows flows into pen and pen and pen, a city of pens and a shed as big as all of Turtle Bay, and above it—birds—hundreds, a swarm of them, so much blacker and bigger than crows are, and turning in a big slow circle over the pens, teetering as if they may fall from the sky, but they are not falling, they will not fall, their dark wings spread for flying but nary a flap.

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And another:

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Billy can hear the river on very still nights, windless nights when the water is high. Or he thinks he can. And when a fog has settled in and sound travels far he can hear the ceaseless low moaning of the beasts where the Chisolm Trail splits and the thunder of their hoofs as they stumble down the chute. Or he thinks he can. And this night, a nearby bark. Thinking it must be the hounds, those coon dogs Fidelman keeps but then it comes from too close by. And then again quiet. And then again, barks and yips. Closer. Yes, likely those hounds on the loose again, tearing around and trailing the scent of raccoon or rabbit. But now the dark shapes enter the yard, dog shapes on the run, but it is not the careless bounding of hounds, not their gangling lope, hooting and howling as hounds will do, but coming on with a silent stealth and swiftness as if they are hardly touching the ground, then crossing past the barn, slipping under the paddock fence without hesitation, moving as if they are not dogs at all but the shadows of dogs or the essence of dogs or the origins of all dogs and no not dogs at all. Coyotes. They stop and sniff the trench with its smell of meat and lime, and start their furious excavation as their forepaws send sprays of soil behind them, this coyote pair upturning the trench, tearing at the horse and taking its torn parts in their teeth. Hock, fetlock, lip. Bolting parts whole. Thrusting with each swallow. Billy has his flintlock. He fires first into the air. Then takes aim. A second shot: misses. The coyote pair heading away now, shapes receding, over the ridge. Billy picks up a piece of the horse and flings it away. There, take what you want. Take it, he says. It was a horse, he says. Now it’s meat.

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Ryder’s sentences are constructed from moving animals, from hoofs and jaws and beating wings. Her paragraphs kick up dust and snarl at you, make it impossible to hold them in a single posture. They’re often protean and wandering, but can equally be curt, economical. The reader may find the experience of traveling through the novel somewhat like going down a slide.

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It’s impressive that a novel with such an experimental bent is able to create such real feelings of momentum and risk; Ryder’s prose is deft and ambitious, yet decidedly more readable, in many respects, than that of other members of her Lishian cohort. It’s perhaps this quality that makes it possible for her to both produce a genuine historical novel that emphasizes telling a story above all, as well as an experimental, structurally ambitious work of writing-for-writers, simultaneously. That she can colocate these two very different kinds of projects is a testament to her skill. Somehow, the abstraction, the dispersal, and the defamiliarization of content generated by her more technical choices (e.g. listing, unpredictable perspective shifts, intrusions of texts, irregular chapter construction) is threaded through the first-order narrative realism in a way that permits the denizens of her world—who are, I suppose, also in some sense also denizens of our world—to maintain a robust, vital concreteness. The final, real things of which Ryder’s story is made up of are living organisms, and the moments they grapple with.

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Which leads one back to considering individual animals, as Billy does. Of course, our principal animal is BtK himself. At the end of the story, I’m left to wonder, what is he now? Dead, the novel says—his death is encoded in his person, and is established as oncoming in the very first chapter of the novel. Nothing more to say, that’s where it was always headed. But the impressive thing Ryder has done, it seems to me, is make it possible, really possible, for Billy to die. And if Billy has died, he must have lived.

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William Dempsey is a founding editor of Propagule.

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