In Tom’s Crossing, storytelling is depicted as a powerful, partisan tool, used to enact violence, reclaim justice, and even seek vengeance against historical wrongs. The novel’s metafictional frame narrative immediately establishes this idea, presenting itself as a corrective to the multiplicity of other flawed accounts that it continually references in the telling of the story. By foregrounding the constructed nature of the narrative and explicitly defining stories as moral instruments, the book argues that the power to control a narrative is the ultimate means of shaping reality and settling old scores. The “truth” of an event becomes secondary to the justice that a well-wielded story can achieve.

The narrative opens by directly challenging the authority of other storytellers, positioning its own version of events as the definitive truth. The narrator, later revealed to be Landry who was herself a participant in the story’s events, dismisses accounts by figures like Abigail Fathwell and Darin Burdelong as “gross mistellins” for their failure to properly center her brother Tom’s role in the story (25). Landry’s direct address to the reader serves as a statement of intent: The entire novel is an act of narrative reclamation. This is further reinforced by the book’s copyright page, which describes the story as “shattered, scattered, recollected, and rearranged” (ii), openly admitting its constructedness. Rather than striving for an impossible objectivity, the narrator embraces subjectivity, claiming the right to assemble the story in a way that serves a specific moral purpose. The act of telling becomes an intervention, a deliberate effort to correct the historical record and restore a character to their rightful place at the center of the narrative.

The novel further develops this idea by framing storytelling as a Gatestone family tradition, an inherited tool for balancing the scales of justice. Tom explains to Kalin that this practice is rooted in a belief that narratives can correct the world’s moral trajectory. As Tom’s ancestor is quoted as saying, “Some say the universe bends toward Justice, but when it don’t, stories mend the trajectory” (30). This philosophy elevates storytelling from mere entertainment to a form of social and historical action. The concept is taken a step further when Tom’s ancestor expounds on the definition of stories as “the lexical fashionins of vengeance. At least the good ones are” (31). This explicit connection between narrative and retribution casts the entire book as an act of vengeance on Tom’s behalf, a rebalancing of the injustices that led to his death and the subsequent distortion of his story.

By presenting a world populated by competing storytellers, the novel illustrates the ongoing battle for narrative control. Within the immediate conflict of Kalin’s quest to reach Tom’s Crossing, Old Porch manipulates the official narrative to make Kalin look like a villain, driving the manhunt for him, as well as the ostracization of Allison from the Orvop community. As narrator, Landry also references events after the fact that show the community’s attempt to make sense of the narrative’s events, most prominently the art exhibits that take place in 2000 and 2031, where all the pieces depict some element of Kalin’s, Tom’s, and Landry’s story. In her telling of the story, Landry dismisses these other accounts as incomplete or misguided, centering her experience as the arbiter of moral value within the world the narrative creates. By seizing control of the narrative, Landry wields the ultimate power, akin to the Colt Peacemaker she holds onto after her death: This power gives her the ability to define justice, enact vengeance, and ensure that her version of the truth is the one that endures.