So Far Gone

So Far Gone is the latest work in Walter’s oeuvre to feature his native Spokane, Washington, as a setting. The novel harkens back to Walter’s beginnings as a crime reporter writing for the Spokesman-Review newspaper. In 1992, Walter covered the Ruby Ridge standoff, and his reporting formed the basis for his first book, Every Knee Shall Bow, a non-fiction account of this event published in 1995.

Walter branched out into fiction in 2001 with his debut novel, Over Tumbled Graves. Walter’s debut, along with his next two novels, featured Spokane as a setting, diving deep into its unsavory side in keeping with conventions of the crime fiction genre. Despite early attempts to write other settings into his work, Walter realized that the Pacific Northwest had an underappreciated literary tradition. This gave him the freedom to look at his hometown and its neighboring locales differently, considering how he might render it as though he were a visitor.

Walter also describes Spokane as an “isolated city,” which creates many story possibilities that allow him to disguise the city and also to introduce artificial elements that fit perfectly into the setting as he knows it (Ehrnwald, Gabe, et al.