Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 2004 as the second of Proulx’s three Wyoming story collections. If Close Range established the territory, Bad Dirt deepens it — the stories are darker, funnier, and more attuned to the changes reshaping the Wyoming landscape: methane drilling rigs replacing cattle ranches, wealthy out-of-staters buying up land for vacation homes, and the old ranching economy giving way to an energy economy that has no use for the skills or values of the people who have lived there for generations.
The collection opens with “The Hellhole,” in which a ranch couple’s life is disrupted by a mysterious sinkhole that appears in their pasture and begins swallowing things. The story works as both realist fiction (sinkholes are a genuine geological hazard in Wyoming) and allegory (the ground is literally giving way beneath a way of life). Other stories range from the grimly comic (“The Indian Wars Refought,” about a reenactment gone wrong) to the quietly devastating (“The Trickle Down Effect,” about a man whose attempts at self-improvement are defeated by the economic structures he cannot see).
Proulx’s Wyoming voice is fully mature here: the compressed, noun-heavy sentences, the landscape descriptions that are simultaneously precise and metaphorical, the characters who express themselves through action rather than speech. The collection lacks a single story as famous as “Brokeback Mountain,” but its overall quality is more consistent than Close Range.
Collecting Bad Dirt
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 2004): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20