Pete Snow is having a rough go of it. A hard-drinking Montana social worker, who has been known to get tossed out of bars before happy hour, Snow’s wife bolted for Texas, while his daughter is a runaway living on the streets of God-knows-where. His barely there life is unraveling, but a chance encounter with an odd, malnourished eleven-year-old named Benjamin gives him a reason to keep on breathing the cold mountain air. Benjamin is the son of Jeremiah Pearl, a fundamentalist doomsday survivalist who makes – and spends – his own currency, lives completely off-the-grid, and seems to be preparing for a showdown. The kind where someone will end up dead, like the infamous standoff at Ruby Ridge, which technically took place in Idaho. Here’s one of my favorite passages, a simple description of Pete’s ramshackle home that captures so much more:

Pete’s cabin sat on five acres in the Purcell Mountains fifteen miles north of Tenmile, a two-mile walk from some decent fishing in the Yaak River. He’d put down two thousand dollars and made payments to a doddering codger who’d built it and now lived with a sister in Bozeman. A kind old guy who showed him all the little kinks of the place, what doors wouldn’t latch, which window wasn’t true. White sandpaper stubble and watering eyes when he left.

Think of getting old.

Think of being only thirty-one yourself and having gotten so much already dead fucking wrong.

Snow’s attempts to save Benjamin from an awful fate, to make just one person’s life better in his own crumbling universe, is the spine of my favorite (fiction) book of the year, Fourth of July Creek, the remarkable debut novel by Smith Henderson. As a native of Montana, and someone with a fondness for conspiracy theorists, someone who once found himself the subject of a white supremacist message board, Fourth of July Creek had me in its sights from the get-go, but it’s a deeply felt humanistic story that will appeal to anyone who feels like the center can’t hold, that something in society is broken. You know, more or less all of us.

“If you have your eyes open, it’s hard not to think that things are going to hell-in-a-handbasket. It may be that we’ve covered the whole planet and we’re all stuck in the same crowded space together, which is weirding us out, but there are many rational people who think that in a generation, this world is done for,” says Henderson, forty-one. “It’s patently obvious what this has to do with survivalists, or religious extremists. You’re going to start looking for ways to endure. I don’t feel like this is crazy, it’s not irrational, and people are way too dismissive of the mindset. I’m sympathetic to the impulses, but I disagree with a host of the solutions, like buying up all the bullets.”

In 2014, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog posted multiple stories from Montana with headlines like “Small-Town Montana Residents Organize to Oppose Presence of White Nationalists” and (my personal favorite) “Montana Klansman’s Idea for ‘Inclusive’ KKK Elicits Derision.” However, as relevant to today’s climate as Fourth of July Creek is, Henderson set it at the dawn of the Reagan “Morning in America” era, a time when the federal government came to be seen as the problem, or the enemy, if one is so inclined. The irony is it was also a time when government programs had little accountability or support, so an isolated social worker like Snow, or renegades like the Pearls, could easily get lost in the shuffle, or the backwoods, intentionally or not.

For many years, Henderson was working on two novels, basically one with a character like Jeremiah and one with a dude like Snow. He said it sucked when he realized the two stories dovetailed and should become one because completion ended up taking about a decade (during which time he also penned a number of short stories and co-wrote the Texas-border set movie "Dance With the One"). For readers though, it was time well spent. Fourth of July Creek, which has been feted by media both old and new, is a staggeringly authentic and original debut work. (It's the first book, of any kind, I’ve read with a social worker protagonist. Such a rich, misunderstood profession.) Henderson utilized Jess Walter’s Ruby Ridge and Maryanne Vollers’ Eric Rudolph biography Lone Wolf to understand the nuts-and-bolts of the survivalist existence, but mostly, he called upon his own life for inspiration. Henderson grew up in Missoula and worked in a group home after college.

“I avoided reading every crackpot manifesto out there; the Unabomber didn’t live that far away, but I grew up in the woods. I don’t consider myself a real outdoorsman. I’m the last person you’d want to go fly-fishing with, but my dad is a logger and I know the terrain,” says Henderson. “I was exposed to a lot in Missoula. I went to school with a lot of fundamentalist Christians, but it's also a town where so many hippies ended up becoming doctors, lawyers, and professors. I knew kids whose parents read the New Yorker and drank good coffee, but at the same time, my granddad is a rodeo guy. I never realized until I'd been gone for a long time how exotic Montana is.”

Amen, brother. Fourth of July Creek is my favorite book of 2014 for many reasons, but at the core, its because as screwed up as Pete Snow is, and as wacko as the Pearls are, there’s a meaningful shared experience. A hopeful one, at that. Smith Henderson’s fantastic book brought to mind the time my little ole’ hometown of Billings came together, as a community, one with a small Jewish population, to hang menorahs in our windows and say Not In Our Town, to bring light to the darkness.

Happy holidays, everyone. Peace.