Ketchikan: A Short Story from Legend of a Suicide

In semiautobiographical stories set largely in David Vann's native Alaska, Legend of a Suicide follows Roy Fenn from his birth on an island at the edge of the Bering Sea to his return thirty years later to confront the turbulent emotions and complex legacy of his father's suicide.

Vann sets him among the commercial docks and slick wooden stairways of Ketchikan, sending him to work at a salmon hatchery while circling the town where his father went astray.

Across the town, the narrative brings him to an uneasy dinner with his father’s former receptionist, where shared plates of fried halibut yield no simple release from his inherited grief. The mist-drenched channel frames his solitary walks past trawlers and purse seiners along the rocky waterfront.

• Small Town Setting: An aging former timber worker living in a trailer after losing his home to Amway exposes the quiet economic decay and bitter marriages behind Ketchikan’s waterfront facade.
• Family Life: A climb up the hillside reveals a childhood home left unpainted for twenty-five years, where peeling green siding and foreign clutter displace any comforting illusion of the past.
• Unreliable Narrator: Nighttime visits to the hatchery culminate in strange rituals, from stealing live fingerlings to drop from cliffs to wading fully clothed into the freezing channel at two in the morning.
• Nature Writing: Memories of remote cabins draped in bear hides and commercial crews winching monster halibut from stormy fjords illuminate the rugged landscape his father could never truly master.
• Also by This Author: Caribou Island, Goat Mountain and Dirt.