Call Down the Thunder is well written and very descriptive. The characters are interesting and the storyline is interesting.

Call Down the Thunder is a novel set in the literal and figurative Depression era, when farmers and their families lost lands that they had tilled for generations and what happens when desperation sets in. The story is how an entire area has to survive on its wits where hard work and perseverance has failed them. As it opens, a rainmaker comes to town, boasting of his new scientific way to bring life-giving rain to a parched, barren, foreclosed town that has all but died. Add to the rainmaker a couple who have lost everything, including each other, as well as heavy-handed loan sharks, a carnival on its last legs, bank robbers and repeated visits from cross-burning bigots on a mission. There is humor, from the standpoint of “just when you think it can’t get any worse”, and it works well. The book had a surprising resolve that brought it full circle, and I look forward to reading more of Dietrich Kalteis’s works in the future.

If you’ve come to think of Kalteis as a writer of modern-day Canadian-flavored gritty noir, this novel may be a jarring departure from what you are expecting. Like his House of Blazes, Kalteis sets Call of Thunder in a historical setting, this time the Kansas dust bowl 🍲 of the Great Depression. It takes you back to the time where country folk on hard times cheered on Bonnie and Clyde. The descriptions take the reader into that stark time with the dry wind blowing across the prairie and family farms decaying and barely staving off the bank’s repo men.

It was a struggle to stay even if your family had been there for three generations. Sonny was a poor dirt farmer in hock way beyond his eyeballs to the bank with debts no honest man could pay 💰. With his marriage to Clara frayed at the edges and barely holding on, he agrees to a last desperate plan to save the farm. And, robbing the bank 🏦 just might be the least of his worrries as he sees fit to go to war against the Klansmen of the Plains.

This is a work which very much brings the thirties back to life from the old cars to the circus 🎪 performers to the sense that no one was gonna help to the dusters raging all through the dry plains.