From the title and illustration of the bear on the cover, I expected something more along the lines of Jack London, man pitted against nature. Or maybe something more horror-tinged, either would have potentially worked.
Instead, this is a collection of three of Harrison's novellas, each of which deal with writers or men of words and books facing their later years and the question of what their lives have been worth. Harrison likes to contrast these characters with other men, who tend towards more manual labor, if they work at all. These other men are more physical, less concerned about money or culture, and they all fuck. A lot. A lot of focus on how much one man is having sex, or how much another isn't. Whether they find a particular woman attractive - almost invariably yes - and where that might lead.
The Beast God Forgot to Invent is from the POV of an older stock trader/rare book dealer, but is ostensibly focused on his recently-deceased friend Joe, who drove his motorcycle headfirst into a beech tree some time back and has a brain that works very differently now. Westward Ho is from the perspective of an Upper Peninsula Native American, who ends up in L.A. He spends a lot of time interacting with the locals, including a congenital liar screenwriter, who throw around money like crazy, eat at strange hours according to strange whims, and are always pursuing some amorphous goal, which they keep hidden behind claims of some other goal.
I gave up on I Forgot to Go to Spain a third of the way in. The main character was a writer of dull biographies who abandoned prose, and wants to reconnect with his first wife, who he married when he was a grad assistant and she was his 18-year-old student, and who he cheated on 8 days into their marriage. In the retelling, he first claims he didn't, or surely hopes he didn't, then as some larger point about how people always filter their histories to burnish their image, admits he did cheat on her, and remembers it fully. And I realized I didn't care about this guy or his bullshit, and I closed the book.
You can make your characters unlikable, but they still need to actually do something interesting besides whine about encroaching age and get their feelings hurt by younger women.
The writer characters all find themselves caught up in the mad rush for "success", where that's defined by money, or having more than one home, or being able to afford to eat something different every day. Yet none of them are satisfied with their lives, certainly not compared to Joe or Brown Dog, who take the approach of working when they need to and otherwise trusting in their more rustic skills to get by.
Brown Dog describes showing up with a chainsaw to cut pulp for a day when he needs cash, and finding a home for the winter by agreeing to fix up someone's summer cabin in exchange for getting to live there. Otherwise he fishes or hunts as needed and sleeps with any woman he can convince to do so. Joe seems to take a similar approach if less conscious about, based on the limited insight of his friend telling the story.
The catch being, the world isn't content to leave either of them to live their lives in that manner. Joe would be fine make a little cave to live in on state land, but the natural resource agency won't allow it and try to keep him out. If he had the money to grease some palms, he could probably finagle a permit to tear the place apart for mineral extraction, but he doesn't know how to play that game, even if he had the resources. Joe finds a particular escape, Brown Dog really isn't able to.
'Joe showed me once, fortunately an easy walk, a particular enormous beech tree on the west end of Au Sable Lake that he looks at from a hundred different directions marked by sticks and five different distances in concentric rings. To him the beech tree has a discerningly separate appearance from each of the five hundred points, so much so that it boggles him, amuses him, makes him joyful, or did anyway before he drank too much of Lake Superior.'
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