The bleakest story I have ever read. 5/5 stars.

It's been more than a month now since I finished this book, so it's certainly high time I processed my emotions and put in a review.

This book is powerful. The writing is incredible. Every character is not only a fully realized human being (with all the flaws, faults, absurdities, cruelties, baseness, and deepest sadnesses that being a human entails), but they are all people that you've encountered in your life. They are the real folks on the street corner, serving food at the diner, working as a cashier, sitting on the bed in the hospital, across from you in the office in their cubicle, slogging through this troublesome journey called life. These characters are the people all around you, living real lives of quiet despair that you only catch a glimpse of once in a while. People making the wrong choices and dealing with the consequences of their actions or the consequences of the terrible, devastating misfortunes that life inevitably thrusts upon them.

The realness of the story is what makes it so incredibly bleak. Because real life is scary, painful, and oftentimes hopeless You don't get easy answers, none of us do. When things go wrong, you don't get some deus ex machina to fix it. It just sucks and you have to live with the fall out. There are no good people, there are just people, trying to do their best and fucking it up at every turn. That's how this book is, that's how things go for every character. Just like real life. There are no heroes here.

This is a masterful, powerful book that is well worth your time. If you read nothing else this year, read Lonesome Dove, but know that it is the most bleakly realistic fiction you may ever read. No one is getting out unscathed, least of all the reader.