I never know how to rate Colin Winnette’s work because I always finish them wondering what the hell just happened. 5 stars, again, because I need people to experience what a wild ride this book is.

Coyote is the story of the splintering of a family after the disappearance of their daughter. It is fragmented and dark and confusing and painful. But Winnette manages to settle his writing somewhere between prose and poetry, making it impossible to stop reading. ( )

Coyote is a novella that seems to riff on the noir detective genre but offers few useful clues or even interviews about the crime that are standard in that often tired literary form. Strangely, even the nameless detective just orbits the main action instead of being the main character. The crime--the disappearance of a child--seems to only mildly bother her parents and because of the title, one wonders if a coyote, an image that is evoked early, took her. The unnamed narrator is the victim’s mother, whose intense voice reveals the dark story in fragments, effectively building suspense. She is in an unloving marriage and seems to perceive that she is also slowly losing her daughter. She periodically reveals unrelated facts about her daughter, also suggesting that she is having trouble coping with what society expects from her in the situation.

Winnette’s approach of revealing small details of this fractured marriage in unusual ways and the narrator’s unusual bits of confession gives the story a strong sense of horror and tension. Despite these revelations, the ending is shocking and entirely unexpected. One may need to read this this unusual and dark novella twice to fully appreciate its subtlety and craft, but its shortness makes that quite reasonable. ( )