It's 1993, a year of optimism, change, and killer music, when Kees VanSpyker, penniless Gulf War veteran and would-be guitar hero, takes a job with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) to infiltrate a Wisconsin mink ranch and find out what happened to the last guy they sent there-who subsequently vanished. Kees just wants to earn enough cash to take his guitar and follow the stampede to Seattle, but "What happened" proves hairier than he bargained for as sinister doings and suspects abound on the ranch, in Madison, and among the ALF members themselves. Kees can't tell whom to trust as he risks his own skin delving into the grisly business of fur farming and double-crosses in this novel described as The Monkey Wrench Gang meets Psycho.
"Everything about Mink is unexpected. The deep dive into mink farming, the trip back to the 90s. The prose is so elegant and evocative, which lulls you into a comfortable sense of nostalgia, only to rip that all away with an ending that leaves you breathless and shocked. A superb book by Zakariah Johnson, and I can't wait to read more."
-Amina Akhtar, author of Kismet
"Late in Zakariah Johnson's debut novel Mink, Kees VanSpyker, stuck in southcentral Wisconsin with those mink farm blues again, realizes that 'the world had gone crazy.' And, oh, man, has it ever in Johnson's wonderfully sly novel.
"In the magical world of fiction, if T.C. Boyle and Robert Bloch had a love child, his name would be Zakariah Johnson. Johnson is a sharp-eyed writer with an ear attuned to the period in which he sets his story. In Mink, it is 1993 and all Kees, a young Iraq war veteran, wants is to collect enough cash to meet his buddy in Seattle and start a band. Circumstances do not make it easy for him: a Keystone Cop-esque ecoterrorist organization; nascent antigovernment 'patriots' on the AM dial and down on the farm; and that mink farm ... What exactly goes on in the barn and in the farmhouse?"
-Jeff Esterholm, lifelong Badger-stater & author of The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Stories
