Buck in the Bottoms: Tales of Gus Elker and the Stolls

Throughout his long literary career, August Derleth wrote dozens of stories about a cantankerous farmer living on the outskirts of Sac Prairie (the fictitious village in Wisconsin based on Derleth's own hometown, Sauk City). Along with his neighbors, Joe and Louisa (Lou) Stoll, Gus becomes involved in all manner of issues-romantic, legal, political, and personal-in tales that combine humor and poignancy. What strikes us above all is Gus's love of the natural landscape and the animals, wild and domesticated, who inhabit it. Gus, Joe, and Lou all reveal shrewdness in dealing with some of the less savory inhabitants of the region, outwitting them as they try to snatch a neighbor's land or engage in other kinds of fraud and chicanery. The rural life of the 1930s and 1940s is etched in vivid detail in these stories, but the geniality, honesty, and sensitivity of the protagonists are the paramount features we take away from these narratives.