Old King

By Maxim Loskutoff

WW Norton 2024

Maxim Loskutoff’s new novel, Old King, has a sizable cast of characters, from capable, laconic Forest Service ranger Mason to sardonic Postal Inspector Nathaniel “Nep” Piper to hapless Duane Oshun, who moves to Montana’s Blackfoot Valley in the 1970s, eventually clearing a small plot of land up in the woods and helping to erect the modest cabin where he’ll live. But since Duane’s nearest neighbor is a taciturn weirdo named Ted Kaczynski, Old King can only really have one character. Its cast can fall in and out of love, its peripherals can worry about their jobs or the government, but this is inevitably a book about the man who would go on to fame and infamy as the Unabomber. 

And the prospect of a Unabomber novel in 2024 is subtly terrifying. We have excellent literary examples of novelists taking nuanced approaches to the villains of history; Hillary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell are excellent, as are Antonio Scurati’s Mussoiini books. But we also have 150 million adult Americans who no longer prefer good to evil, or even recognize a difference between the two. Since the nihilistic elements of terrorism culture have always venerated Ted Kaczynski and argued that his manifesto should be taught in schools, the prospect of a Unabomber novel in which he’s actually portrayed as the hero he thought he was is deeply depressing. 

Kaczynski was a cold-blooded killer. He postured as a lone voice crying out against depredations of the government and the harvesting of the natural world, but if he hadn’t been obsessed by these things, if he’d had no obsessions at all, he’d still have been a cold-blooded killer. The bombs that he lovingly constructed and mailed killed three people and injured two dozen others, and he wanted to kill more people: the destruction of American Airlines Flight 444 by one of his bombs was only narrowly averted. “All winter,” Loskutoff writes, “he’d imagined a plane falling from the sky in a roil of flame and green smoke [green because he laced the bomb with barium nitrate], the image played on every news station in America, showing the audience that their technology was not safe, the infrastructure would not hold.” 

That was one of his only failures. For nearly 20 years, he made increasingly-deadly bombs in his rural shack in Nebraska, brought them to the post office on his bicycle, and mailed them to unsuspecting victims. The FBI, acting with its maddeningly customary combination of sloth and stupidity, completely failed to stop this reign of terror. It was only when newspapers published Kaczynski’s manifesto and his brother David said, “Hey, this is the kind of crazy stuff my brother always used to say” and phoned the nearest field office that the Bureau was able to apprehend the Unabomber in 1996.

Loskutoff plays on the tension at the heart of this story: all his characters know Ted Kacyznski, and all his characters are increasingly aware of the Unabomber, but only the reader knows those two people are the same. Some of this authorial tension-playing is skillfully done, but too often Loskutoff’s allegorizing is as ham-handed as a fundamentalist Sunday sermon, particularly where the novel’s grizzly bear is concerned. The creature is captured by a loutish character when it's still young. It’s lame in one foot and unrelentingly savage toward its captors (“I feed you every day,” the beast is told, just in case the reader isn’t paying attention, “why are you still trying to kill me?”), and it casts a spell on “Ted” when they lock eyes in a dramatic moment: “The bear was the first real killer he’d ever encountered. He wanted to be a killer.” The bear will eventually kill a human, and a conflicted Mason will stalk it in an arc that’s such a drearily obvious parallel for Kacyznski’s trajectory that it all feels like one of the most first-draft ideas this very capable writer has ever released into the sunlight. 

The novel affects to share Kacyznski’s affectation with caring about the natural world. When poor “tall fool” Duane encounters an enormous Douglas fir deep in the woods, for instance, he has a belittling epiphany: “The thick, regal trunk was rod-straight and the upper branches looked like the roots at Duane’s feet, reaching for purchase in the heavens,” the muddled narrative goes (the roots are reaching for the heavens?), “The needles were deep, shimmering blue and he felt humbled in the cool of its shade – a small furless animal at the foot of an old king.” And just as the reader is realizing that this old king and thousands like it will be cut down by the same logging companies that are enraging Kacyznski, Duane stumbles on the primitive altar the Unabomber erected to the tree, and suddenly “the clearing had taken on a menacing air, no longer the enchanted garden.” 

This is all disappointingly lazy. Piper worries that the Unabomber will make people afraid of the Postal Service (“one of the last institutions they trusted”), which could “shake the very foundations of democracy.” A handful of pages later, about Kaczynski we’re told “He wanted to make people afraid of the postal service, to shake their faith in the pillars of industrial society.” One of the ostensible good guys and a psychopathic terrorist, thinking the same, reasoning the same, sounding the same, being written the same. What is the reader supposed to feel about that, when it’s repeated over 250 pages, other than a temptation to equate the two? 

“You know what we’re dealing with here?” a bomb survivor tells Piper. “It’s pretty simple: 

Some recluse, some pathetic lonely loser who hates progress, hates the future, hates what the world is becoming. He thinks he’s funny. He’s probably holed up somewhere all day remembering how much better the world was back when he was a kid playing in the woods.” 

But although that’s entirely true, it’s not the Kacyznski Old King gives us. Instead, we get a grim, ideologically steadfast, almost John Brown figure who’s paralleled with a majestic, wronged grizzly bear for 200 pages. The Unabomber, who killed himself in 2023 because the authorities didn’t strap him to a large incendiary device and detonate it in 1996, would probably have scorned this novel as he scorned everything. But he probably wouldn’t have objected to it, and that should leave readers who finish Old King wanting a long, hot bath. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News