“When I lived in a little farming town called St. John, I used to sit around with the old guys and they would say stuff like, ‘We used to steal a school bus every year and drive it around town.’ And they thought it was the funniest thing in the world, and I thought it was pretty funny too.

“But 15 minutes later, they would castigate kids for doing something similar. They didn’t understand that by telling that story they were encouraging the kids to do what they were doing. And so you’ve got all these young boys growing up acting like this character that’s been created for them. Then it destroys them because the character doesn’t work anymore,” he says.

That illustration sounds almost tame compared to the narrative Holbert has crafted in Lonesome Animals, his first published novel, which will be released this month. The story follows a series of gruesome murders in and around Okanogan County in the post-Depression era. In true Western style, tinged with the noir stylings that are more familiar to the urban landscape, a maverick lawman sets out to find the killer and bring him to justice.

But just as Holbert maintains that the Western myth is flawed because it lacks a “moral center,” so too does the notion of justice that it embraces.

    -PROFILE: Western Gothic: In Lonesome Animals, his debut novel, local schoolteacher and writer Bruce Holbert exposes the destructive power of the Western myth. (E.J. Iannelli, 5/09/12, Pacific Northwest Inlander)