Maxim Loskutoff was only 11 years old when Ted Kaczynski was apprehended in a cabin outside Lincoln.
Over the years, the native Missoulian mulled over the idea of a book about the Unabomber as he got older and developed as a writer. Yet even after reading the diaries, the manifesto, the accounts of neighbors, he felt as though the person at the center — Kaczynski himself — remained elusive. The more Loskutoff learned, he said, “the less clear his motivations became.”
Max Loskutoff, a local author, recently published his new book, “Old King.”
“They emanated from such a stew of ideology and resentment and pathology that it took me a long time to figure out how to write this book,” he said.
He finally found a strategy. He made the most infamous character in his novel “Old King” an ensemble character. The backbone of the story is Kaczynski’s criminal spree, in which he spent 20 years living anonymously in a plywood shack, building handmade bombs that killed three people and maimed another 23. But he’s part of a larger narrative about the lives of his neighbors in Lincoln and the larger questions about the West, the main concern of his three books.
