Tom Bouman explores dark side of gas drilling in debut novel

The Marcellus Shale drilling forms the backdrop of Tom Bouman’s tense, gritty police thriller. Set in the fictional town of Wild Thyme on the northern border of Pennsylvania, the story delves into the very real tensions unearthed by the influx of gas drilling and gas money in a small, poverty-stricken rural town.

The narrator is policeman Henry Farrell, a haunted character with deep roots in the troubled town and an unpleasant past that he reveals in dry asides (of a mutilated corpse found in the woods, he remarks, “I’ve seen bodies— dry corpses crawling with flies in dusty streets, an old woman withered in her armchair, dead for weeks. To say they all seemed to belong where they were might not speak too well of me, or of the places I’ve been. This one didn’t belong where he lay.”) and abrupt detours. He has the feel of a man too mired in old grief to speak of it with any clarity, and his backstory comes in floods of narrative that dry up as quickly as they begin. He’s got no love for the gas drilling that followed him back home from where he was living out west, but it takes a while to find out why: his wife, who readers meet only though Henry’s sporadic trips down memory lane, died of a series of mysterious ailments borne of contaminated water, and he spent every penny he owned trying to get a lawyer to take on the gas drillers.

“In the end,” he writes, “it got too much and I let it go […]. The old gray dog took two days to run from Idaho Springs to Binghamton.”

Now the gas drilling has followed him home, and it seems to have sown destruction in its path. The short-term drilling crews have brought their own variety of lawlessness, and gas money erodes neighborly trust. “People were scooping up windfalls, but they were different sizes […]. Neighbors stayed neighborly, but kept an eye on their property lines.”

The plot opens with a dead stranger found out in the back woods; by the end of the day, Henry’s only deputy, a hard-drinking brawler with secrets of his own, turns up dead as well. The only clues are Aub, the senile old man who owns the land and a family of reclusive, well-armed outlaws who want nothing to do with the police, particularly after a handful of meth labs are tossed in the search. Bouman colorfully evokes the suspicious anarchic flavor of his fictional town: “The whole Heights were interconnected with trails used with as much regularity as the county routes. Trails leading from home to home, spot to spot, hidden places you’d never see from any road. A decent outdoorsman with sympathetic neighbors could run me around for weeks.”

As it turns out, that’s more or less precisely what happens. The only suspect holds Henry at gunpoint and disappears into the woods; the small, underfunded local police department is too shorthanded to make any real effort at following him. That leaves Henry to walk the back woods alone, wandering between past and present, the tangled web of local history as vividly present as the current murder investigation: the old unmarked grave of a mysterious woman not far from where the initial victim was found, the deer trails where Henry’s father and his suspect’s father used to hunt before things went sour between them, the nearby summer camp where wealthy outsiders mingled with the locals, to sometimes disastrous effect.

While Dry Bones in the Valley is built around a mystery, at its heart is the story of lost loves and lost chances, of irrevocable decisions and family ties that hurt as often as they soothe. Henry has come home seeking some kind of peace, and it’s not clear by the end whether or not he’s found it.

“They say you shouldn’t talk about the old days and how much better everything used to be,” he writes, “but my old days are still on the young side, and I often think about them.”

It’s a bittersweet ending to a story where there are no easy answers.

Tom Bouman is a former book editor and musician who lives with his wife and daughter in northeastern Pennsylvania. ‘Dry Bones in the Valley’ is his first novel.