We Burn Daylight is a contemporary western set in Waco, Texas, beginning in 1993. Though it’s based on the David Koresh/Branch Davidian standoff with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and later the FBI, it’s not a definitive play-by-play history of those events; rather it is the setting of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet. Royal (Roy) is a fourteen-year-old boy, the younger son of the local sheriff and a nurse and whose elder brother is serving in Iraq. Roy’s love interest is Jaye, who tags along when her mother leaves her husband and California to follow Perry Cullen, a charismatic religious leader who has set up a compound in Texas. Their relationship with highly emotional yet restrained. The reader constantly wonders how it will play out with one lover trapped in the commune with a quirky religious leader who grooms young girls, and the other on the outside, on the side of law and order.
The story is told in the points of view of Roy and Jaye that show their relationship and its growth. There are interspersed podcast segments from 2024. I was initially somewhat on the fence about the use of these podcasts. Early on, they are so terse that it’s hard to tell how they fit in with Jaye and Roy’s story. Later, I could see they provided the background for the main story. Johnson’s prose is succinct, forceful, yet elegant with some truly lovely turns of phrases and the ability to, with spartan words, fully develop his characters. As a West Texas native, I appreciated his ability to capture both the sparseness and richness of the landscape—and its laconic inhabitants.
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We Burn Daylight (Random House, July 30, 2024) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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