"Danilo John Thomas in his stunning collection of Big Sky noir, The Hand Implements, goes mano a mano with wily language, whooping syntax, and subterranean deep grammar to construct an infrastructure of primal pain and infinite loss. These fictions operate as your debased and basic machines of manipulated misapprehension—lever and wedge, wheel and pulley, screw and incline plane—the incremental perturbations of rising actions and the honed-edged howling declivities of denouements, all lubricated by bad blood and misfiring synapses countersunk and snuggly fitted with the rusted tang of genius."
- Michael Martone author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana
"Here’s a proposition: we’re always building something, even when we’re tearing it down. The characters in Danilo John Thomas’s visceral, intense The Hand Implements unknowingly implement this proposition into just about every action they carry out. Set for the most part in a kind of Realist mythic Montana, young men drink and regret it, commit violent acts and regret them, get old and won’t forgive themselves for the normal lives they think they lead, wonder if they have ever been useful. These are stories of masculinity examined, stories of passionate action and inaction in which each life lived is potentially a terrible trap waiting for the pressure that will set it off. They’re also stories close to the land. Take up residence here: you’ll remember why we read in the first place."
- Thomas Cotsonas, author of Nominal Cases
"Danilo Thomas is a dude. He is a dude writing dude fiction, the expansive Western kind popularized by Cormac McCarthy, drawn from the lyrical refuse of Faulkner, that lineage that stretches all the way back to the Bible and continues to ask the same question as it plunges forth. Can violence can be beautiful? We are living the answer many seem to have taken literally, and Thomas is quite conscious of how justifications for taking space and taking hostages reveal themselves as halfcocked. The body becomes the noxious mine, a space to be separated and sifted without a pic, with the fingers. Searched for prizes. Destroyed. The masculine body, if impossibly strengthened and sharpened, contains the promise of a refuge from the inevitability of failure in a space where failure is banned, and so of course orbited. Toxic masculinity is literalized and addressed as both an inheritance of the psyche and a physical actuality.
- Jessica Lee Richardson, author of It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides
“Thanks to his clear eye and his craftsmanship, Danilo John Thomas’s commanding prose always leave readers breathless. His work ought to be chiseled in stone: not only to ensure its lasting power, but to capture the feel of his wondrous language in the most immutable form.”
- B.J. Hollars, author of Flock Together and This Is Only A Test
