I was on page 77 of Jon Billman’s short story collection When We Were Wolves when I did something I’ve never done before. I wrote a fan letter.

I did a quick search of the Internet for “Jon Billman,â€? found an e-mail address and, even though I was only a few pages into the book, dashed off a correspondence dripping with praise. I wrote sentences like “You've got my writer's blood all stirred up and you've given me renewed hope for the future of short fiction.â€? I gushed. I swooned. I was a teenage girl stripping off her bra and throwing it at Elvis’ feet.

I don’t regret one word of the hyperbole.

Ladies and gentlemen, I haven’t been this weak-kneed about something since the day I cracked open Richard Ford’s Rock Springs. Before that, you’d have to go back to the first time I kissed the girl who’d later become my wife.

In his debut, Billman writes with the kind of sharp, muscular prose that makes me happy to be a writer…not to mention positively giddy to be a reader. What a joy it was to discover this exciting new author (and, by the way, I owe a big debt of gratitude to author and fellow Epinions scribe Ron Franscell for first pointing me toward Billman).

I should tell you right now, this review is going to be about as balanced as a man walking down the street carrying a load of bricks in one hand and a sack of feathers in the other. I tried to find something less-than-praiseworthy about these thirteen stories, but I couldn’t, I really couldn’t. Just thought I’d warn you before the gush got too deep. (And yes, for all of you who are wondering, Mr. Billman did write me back with a very kind and gracious note.)

You should also be advised that I’m probably prejudiced toward this collection of stories because most of them are set in Wyoming—that squarish state populated with sagebrush, antelope and miles and miles of barbed wire. I grew up in Jon Billman’s Wyoming. This was my land; these were my people on these pages.

Many of the stories are set in Hams Fork, Billman’s Yoknapatawpha, a small town where “no one beautiful or vital ever stays long.â€? Hams Fork is a place where the nearest tree is thirty miles north of town. The isolation, the on-edge desperation of the state and its residents is evident on nearly every page. At one point, someone says of Wyoming: No one wants to be here. Permanence isn’t Western in nature. You take what you can get, or get what you have to take, and move on, get the hell out. Vamoose.

But Billman is such a good writer that he easily transcends any thematic borders, leaping over the limitations of purely regional writing like a wild mustang clearing a barbed-wire fence, then continuing to gallop toward, say, New York City. This is literature everyone can read and walk away from deeply affected.

In “Indians,â€? he writes about a Depression-era bush-league baseball team from the reservation whose one-armed pitcher can predict rain by way of his missing arm. As the team barnstorms around the drought-stricken Dakotas, the tension rises like barometric pressure.

“Custer Complexâ€? and “Ashâ€? have forest firefighters as their main characters—a profession that Billman himself once worked, by the way. In one, a computer error sends a firefighter to a blaze that burned out two years ago; in the other, a crew member falls in love with a girl named Ash (She was big. Not sloppy. Not classically voluptuous. Big. She could hold her own.) and the relationship leads to recklessness.

In another incredibly subtle story, “Winter Fat,â€? Billman writes about an ex-con who befriends a family of Mormons. All is well until they start hearing reports of public sculptures stolen from town squares.

A character named Wayne Kerr makes several appearances in When We Were Wolves, including the final story, “Albatross,â€? which is one of the most perfectly-written soliloquies I’ve seen since Shakespeare. Wayne, a renegade artist who likes to airbrush half-naked women on water towers, slowly freezes after collapsing on a deserted golf course. Here’s Wayne, paralyzed and fighting off hypothermia, staring at the sky:

Full-blown night had fallen on the Hams Fork Valley. The Hale-Bopp comet loomed overhead in the northwest. So dark, so very dark, the light of the comet was brilliant—Wayne could clearly see the comet’s vapor trail. To him it resembled a submerged Alka-Seltzer.

Billman has the clear, focused wit of Sherman Alexie and the gritty desperation of Raymond Carver. While I’m at it, I’d also throw in all the best qualities of Rick Bass and Richard Ford as well. He’s that good.

But he’s his own master—staking out plots of literary territory like a rancher stringing fences. This is a wholly accurate portrait of Wyoming—the land and the people—and it’s a parcel of earth that Billman knows intimately. At one point, I realized with a shiver that Billman also seemed to know me intimately when he described a character who was practically a mirror image of my own experience:

I had my useless degree in English lit, which took me six and a half years to get. I majored in English because I liked reading. Or at least I didn’t mind it. I wanted to fight forest fires during the season and do nothing in the wintertime. Maybe some skiing. Maybe read some books. It was that time of my life—my mid-twenties—when I hadn’t yet realized that fortune wasn’t going to fall from the sky, knock me down, and stick to me like slurry.

It only took me five years to get my degree and I wasn’t prone to firefighting…but everything else—wow! That’s the kind of passage that makes me dog-ear the page and reach for the highlighter. In fact, there are so many highlighter marks and marginal ink scribblings in my copy that it looks like someone turned a three-year-old loose with a box of crayons on a freshly-washed wall.

When We Were Wolves is the kind of book that makes me want to race through from start to finish in the same way I’d gulp a cold mug of sarsaparilla on a summer day. But yet, I told myself to slow it down, to savor the language. After all, you toss back that sarsaparilla and you’ll miss the sweet froth, the edgy bite.

Here are two more of my favorite sentences—both describing female characters—from this collection:

I’ve seen Copper open a beer bottle with her eye socket.

Robin is pretty in the way wood smoke smells nice.

And, if you’ll indulge me just a minute longer, here’s a pitch-perfect passage from the Carveresque “Sugar Cityâ€? where a newlywed couple finds their impetuous marriage quickly veering toward disaster:

Bonnie slumped against my shoulder and slept the fitful sleep of the depressed who don’t have their medication quite dialed in. A rainbow air freshener that hadn’t bothered me before hung from the rearview mirror. I ripped it down, looking over at sleeping Bonnie, and threw it out the window.

Night would soon settle on the southern Idaho desert, northbound, and I began to need the ceremony of eggs and a bottomless cup of coffee. It’s the surest thing about the road, breakfast at any hour, and something to chew on when driving all night: loss and breakfast. Bonnie still didn’t know about the ten-thousand-dollar donation I’d made in Reno.

Right about now, you’re probably thinking, “He’s given away all the best parts of the book and there’s nothing left.â€? Trust me, dear reader, there’s plenty of literary treasures I’ve left untouched. The talent on display in When We Were Wolves is, indeed, as wide as the Wyoming horizon. ( )