Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1992, Jess Walter was a staff writer at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, when he got word of an armed standoff at an isolated mountaintop cabin in northern Idaho.
Walter rushed to the scene, and his on-the-ground reporting recorded the incident that later became known as the Ruby Ridge standoff. It began when Randy Weaver — an Aryan Nations sympathizer with apocalyptic religious beliefs — failed to show up in court to face charges related to selling a sawed-off shotgun. In response, federal agents swarmed his cabin. At the end of the bloody 11-day standoff, Weaver’s wife, son and a U.S. marshal were all dead. Ruby Ridge galvanized the anti-government militia movement, and it continues to loom large in modern political discourse.
The siege was the subject of Every Knee Shall Bow — Walter’s only work of nonfiction. But now, three decades into a career as a best-selling and award-winning novelist, his new novel grapples with a nation whose ideas of freedom, values and government were forever changed after Ruby Ridge.
So Far Gone is the story of Rhys Kinnick, a divorced middle-aged man who has become disillusioned with life. His son-in-law, Shane, has fallen into a bottomless well of conspiracy theories, and Kinnick cannot understand why his daughter stays with him. His newspaper laid him off, and his country elected Donald Trump as president. It all proves too much for him, so he exiles himself to an off-the-grid cabin.
One day, his grandkids, whom he hasn’t seen in years, show up. Their mom — Kinnick’s daughter — is missing, and Shane has gone in search of her.
So Far Gone is not a fictionalized retelling of Ruby Ridge and the Weavers’ story. But it features characters who might have cheered them on. Set in and around his hometown of Spokane, Walter’s story is an exploration of disillusionment and its consequences.
“I think that disillusionment is one of the most human things that happens to us,” he said. “So, for Rhys to suddenly find himself the disillusioned one and feeling pushed out of society struck me as a great starting point for a novel.”
“I think that disillusionment is one of the most human things that happens to us.”
Kinnick is not the only character who feels alienated. His daughter struggles to understand Shane, who finds fellowship among Idaho’s well-armed religious separatists. Walter said the book was inspired by his own growing anxiety over politics, crystallized by his phone’s screen time usage report. “It informed me that I had been spending five and half hours a day on my phone, doomscrolling. I realized I couldn’t go on like this, imagining the demise of the country,” he told High Country News. “I imagined myself going into a metaphoric woods to write the novel, turning my back on all of it.”
While So Far Gone deals with heavy themes like the popularity of conspiracy theories and militia-slash-churches, Walter’s quirky cast of characters infuse the story with humor. In one early scene, Kinnick fumes when Shane insists that there is a far-reaching conspiracy within the NFL, where the most powerful people on the planet are trying to take control of everyone on and off the gridiron. Later, a gunfight erupts over a set of brand-new truck tires.
Walter says the comic bent makes the story “in some ways more real, and that makes it more horrible,” he said. “People do get shot over things like tires. I believe so fully in the folly and fallibility of human beings; in many ways, it’s the only constant. So I don’t write humor as an effect; I write it as a philosophical underpinning of the world as I see it.”
In the 30 years since he bore witness to the anti-government protesters that assembled at Ruby Ridge, Walter has watched as those once-fringe conspiracy theories have become mainstream. “Now, we live in such a conspiracy-rich world,” he said. “I don’t think Ruby Ridge was the cause of this so much as a harbinger of what was to come.”
So Far Gone captures this unique moment, when Americans wrestle with a loss of purpose amid a pervasive and deepening political divide.
Walter is now returning to his first book, which was retitled Ruby Ridge, to provide its first update since 2008. A new afterword will note the deaths of Randy Weaver, in 2022, and Gerry Spence, Weaver’s legendary firebrand lawyer, who died this August. Walter is also retracing the path that enabled anti-government sentiment to flourish in the West ever since the incident.
“Part of the update is looking at the way in which conspiracy theories have not only been absorbed into the mainstream, but have really become a winning political formula,” he said.
And while these serious topics have occupied his life and writing for many years, he remains hopeful. “My son calls me a toxic optimist because I am so optimistic in general. I’m optimistic about human beings and their capacity for change and decency.”
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This article appeared in the November 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Jess Walter is not done with Ruby Ridge.”
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