Pete Fromm is simply an excellent writer of short stories. As of late, I see more and more fiction writers drawing their characters from the fringes. I guess their thinking is that the more eccentric, strange, and bizarre their characters, the better their stories. For me, though, their thinking is skewed. Bizarre characters don't invite me in as a reader. They push me away. I can't connect with them. But, I can connect with the characters of Pete Fromm's wonderful Night Swimming. His are people we know. His people are us. I think of the father in the story "Doors". He's a man who's simply trying to figure out his teenage son -- this angry stranger he seemingly suddenly finds living under his roof. Our children growing away from us. Down to earth theme -- but a theme we can connect with. Fromm's characters are real people. Pete Fromm writes a fiction that can truly be called literary and important. With so many literary magazines floating around, I find myself feeling as though I'm opening oysters as I peruse their pages. And so many of their fiction writers leave me feeling as though I am holding an empty shell. But Fromm is definetely a pearl. Buy this book. You'll enjoy reading it.

Night Swimming is a collection of Pete Fromm's fascinating short stories, full of odd-ball characters who seem somehow strangely familiar to us. Young Fromm peeks through the windows of dozen homes whose families are as disfunctional as our own, but whose starkly real situations and reactions enlighten our own daily efforts to enoble our dry, brown lives. One young man gives up his dreams in order to become a janitor in his mother's nursing home, so he can be closer to her in her last days. An couple torn by childlessness struggle over a decision to adopt. An FAA investigator accustomed to eavesdropping on the last "blackbox" conversations of doomed pilots, seems equally an observer in his own relationship with his son, as they stand in their darkened house: " Victor reached an arm out to his son but touched only emptiness." A youth stuck in a desperately boring home finds excitement and kindness in his dangerously wild older sister. But beyond the fascinating characters, Fromm brings us clean, fast-paced detail -- a key to his creation of intimacy: "This isolation is womblike somehow, but all wrong; the world nothing but white noise, dirty white sky, dirty white ice; no place where one ends and the other begins...as I wind through the turn, stumbling on the broken, lumpy ice, the wind begins to nudge me forward, pushing me, urging me on...I don't want to find what it wants me to see." Fromm's views of the Montana landscape become interior portraits of the hearts of lonely children and struggling grownups. His vision is vivid, understandable, and identifiable. His are not words, but thoughts in the reader's head. Some of us study our craft for decades hoping to approach what Pete Fromm has produced in six years. So we read this book to revel in its strange, familiar worlds. And to see how it's done, when it's done well.

Pete Fromm as a young man was the proverbial dumb collegestudent jerk and the classic Walter Mitty. He picked his college onthe basis of the mascot of a mountain goat pictured on college's brochure and enrolled in college courses and selected his major just as blithely. He agreed to spend 7 months in the wilderness on a whim because he thought it would enable him to fulfill his romantic dreams of becoming a "MOUNTAIN MAN." He'd begun spinning these fantasies after reading several accounts of real and fictitious mountain men supplied to him by his college roommate. Without any thought or knowledge of the fact that his job would take up only 7 minutes of his time daily, Fromme entered the wilderness with every naive and ignorant idea about what lay ahead of him. Fortunately, in the two weeks he had to outfit himself he managed to acquire some things which saved him from abject isolation. He took only 5 or 6 books, mostly on how to survive in the wilderness, some guns (which his roommate taught him to use a few days before his departure), more beans then there are in Boston along with some other basic foodstuffs, some writing paper, a First Aid kit, and not much else. As a going away gift, he acquired a puppy, which he promptly named "Boone," to keep him company. Naive and ignorant about what he had gotten himself into, he survived to tell an extremely funny tale which shows his maturation into a more thoughtful and fine young man. Every page provides a laugh and the tale is a real "coming of age" chronicle of youth. P.S.: Actually I listened to the audio-tape, which was very well read and which I highly recommend!

THIS IS A GREAT COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES. DON'T LET THE HUNTING BACKDROP OF THE STORIES SCARE YOU OFF. THESE STORIES ARE ABOUT PEOPLE - REAL PEOPLE - AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH EACH OTHER INTERWOVEN IN UNUSUAL AND OFTEN HUMOROUS SITUATIONS.

AFTER READING, I GUARANTEE YOU WILL LOOK FOR MORE BOOKS BY FROMM, WHICH IN MY OPINION, IS THE HIGHEST COMPLIMENT.

Watching the relationship between Austin and Abilene is a little like looking down from a high tower watching two cars race toward a deadly collision. You desperately want to prevent the collision, but the movement of the cars is too beautiful, too graceful, and you don't dare intervene.

The beauty and grace are supplied by Pete Fromm, whose novel is filled with insights and surprises from the first page. What makes it the more remarkable is that the story is told by Austin, a high school sophomore in middle-of-nowhere, Texas, whose world view has been shaped entirely by his bipolar older sister, Abilene.

This is a fine novel on so many levels. It's a love story, a tragic love story set in the vast emptiness of West Texas, where everything is simple except for the people. It's a sports story, with an ambitious coach (Abilene) with an ax to grind jealously guarding her young phenom (Austin) out of love, hope and desperation, all of which are as twisted as a mesquite trunk. It's a story of a family whose love is under a blistering attack by mental illness, obsession and misunderstanding.

Most importantly, it's written with compassion, empathy and a delicacy of language that makes us hope that Fromm will keep producing for a long, long time. Put him in the ranks of Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry. Come again, soon, Pete.

This is probably one of the more memorable stories I have read in the past few years. I was introduced to Fromm's writing through Nightswimming, and have gotten my hands on everything else he has written since then. His stories are compelling, his writing style is easy, and the characters have a great deal of depth and breadth to them. All of my friends who have read this book have been blown away by it, unable to put it down, consistently moved at the end.

From page 2 I was hooked. Perhaps it was because I could relate to the Texas surroundings, or the brother/sister relationship, or even the family struggle with Bipolar Disorder. But whatever it was I was engaged in this story from the "get-go". (See, I told you I could relate to the Texas stuff!) Don't think you have to share their passion for baseball, or know anything about mentall illness. You will live it! Pete Fromm had me crying--a heartfelt, hopeful cry. I wish I could visit these characters 10 years later and see How All This Ends Up.

Initmate look inside the head of a rural American man as he encounters a variety of real life situations. Characters laid out such that the reader can quickly identify with and "be" the character as he finds himself weighing the ramifications of his possible actions. Pete Fromm does a "deep dive" very quickly into his characters and allows you into his head for a slice of time.

These short stories are all well rended depictions of life and how it sometimes seems to go offtrack. There is a sense of sadness that permeates the book, including the title story, about a father who is not really kidnapping his son, and says to his ex-wife-I had a life-so sad. Many good stories, with well developed characters who connect. There is an echo of Raymond Carver, moving the characters from New England to the Pacific Northwest. I have just finished reading Indian Creek Chronicles, a memoir by the same writer, and it is really worth reading, sweet, innocent, honest and revealing.

I found this book a nice easy read in general. My main reason for picking it up is because this true story takes place within minutes of my residence. It was interesting to read about another person's adventures in the same wilderness that I hike, hunt, camp, and explore in on a regular basis. It is honest in that the author is not constantly glorifying himself or trying to prove that he was an expert mountain man. He also shows the reader the harsh, unforgiving environment that this area can become during the long winter months, and the dangers of not being prepared. Since it is a true story told in first-person perspective, it is more of a journal or autobiography than escape literature.

A chance conversation with a college friend sends the author venturing into the Bitterroot Wilderness along the Montana-Idaho border, where he spends a winter tending to salmon eggs for the Idaho Dept. of Fish and Game. This responsibility takes only minutes out of each day; the rest of the time is his own, and what this gregarious, impulsive, party-loving 20-year-old does with seven months of isolation in the wilderness is the central theme of this book.

Fromm makes clear from the outset that he's almost utterly unprepared for this experience, with little guiding him but a fascination for the rugged, self-sufficient mountain men whose adventures he has read about. Packing a couple books on outdoor survival, he plans to figure it out as he goes, and given a need to keep himself busy and his mind off the isolation, he acquires a range of on-the-job skills, from operating a chain saw, to camp cooking, skinning animals, and curing meat. He also hunts for game, subsisting on grouse and squirrel until he amazingly (and illegally) bags a moose with a muzzle-loader.

In fact, Fromm is not entirely alone -- he has a dog as a constant companion -- and there is a trickle of visitors throughout the winter. Besides the occasional visit by the wardens, who bring mail and packages, there are hunters and their guides who trek in on snowmobiles (snowmachines, as he learns to call them). Welcoming the company -- and curious -- he goes along on hunts, witnessing the shooting of a mountain lion.

There are some disappointments. His father and brother travel from Milwaukee and attempt to ski in but are turned back by cold and bad trail conditions. A planned "vacation" with friends in Missoula has to be cancelled when snowslides make access difficult. He consoles himself after killing and skinning an injured bobcat that he wouldn't have had this experience if he hadn't been on his own.

The book invites comparison with C. L. Rawlins' "Broken Country," in which the author recalls a college-boy summer as a cook and horse wrangler for a sheepherder in the mountains of western Wyoming. A reader will also be reminded at times of Edward Abbey's youthful "Desert Solitaire."All exhibit a willingness to abandon themselves to adventure without considerable forethought, but there's a relative lack of reflectiveness on the part of Fromm, who is able to report straightforwardly what he observes but tends to avoid making connections to the ideas of other people or to think deeply or critcally about his experience. This makes the book more of a page-turner; you rarely put it down to let something he's written soak in.

In the end, you forgive him his youth, give him credit for surviving (there are some close calls that may have turned his story into another "Into the Wild"), and appreciate the clean, clear style and the ability to create and maintain suspense (for example when his father and brother fail to arrive). I'm happy to recommend it to anyone with an interest in Western nonfiction, wilderness adventures and the psychological aspects of isolation.

Charging through life and forgetting what is truly important is easy to do these days. Pete Fromm has ensured that I will never let that happen to me again. The Indian Creek Chronicles is a quick read that is very difficult to put down once you start. The insightful observations, true adventures, and humble realizations lyrically woven through the book keep you reading on and on. I found myself relating easily to Fromm's life outside the wilderness, and then quickly envying his time in the wilderness. If you appreciate the outdoors like I do, you'll love this book. From the first page, it stokes the fire of adventure and intrigue offered by the wilderness around us. If you have little appreciation for the outdoors or wilderness, you'll find a great personal escape in Fromm's escape to the Idaho wilderness. I highly recommend The Indian Creek Chronicles to all.

In contrast to the other reviewers, I would have to say that these are primarily fishing stories, with personal relationships playing a secondary role. None of the stories really grabbed me and I found the writing to be nothing spectacular. I enjoyed Mr. Fromm's other work more (ie., Indian Creek Chronicles).

Having never read one of Mr. Fromm's other books I was hesitant to take a bite of this one. I'm glad I did. My only problem now is, do I dare read any of his other works for fear of being disappointed. I'm afraid, for me, he has set a very high standard to be met in the future.

All of the short stories in "Blood Knot", are fishing stories, more importantly to those of us who live in Norman Maclean territory, they are predominately fly fishing stories. If, after reading just one of these ten stories you believe that fact is important to the stories then you must also believe that "Moby Dick" is a story about a whale. For all it matters, Fromm could have been writing about knitting, or mountain climbing. His stories are about human relationships, good and bad.

Each story is well crafted, not too short and not too long. The characters are real, we feel their emotions and if not we at the very least can recognize their struggle with what life has served them...

My only regret is that there are only ten stories. I guess I will have to tempt disappointment, and try one of Mr. Fromm's other offerings. I only hope they are as tasty as this one.