It has been almost 27 years since the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay 21-year-old college student in Laramie, Wyoming, who was kidnapped, pistol whipped, robbed, set on fire, and then left to die tied to a roadside fence. I remember thinking how lucky I felt, back in 1998, to be living far away from that rural road in Wyoming. Even then, though, I must have recognized the folly of believing the worst would always happen elsewhere, out there beyond the law.

The inciting incident in Percival Everett’s 2005 novel Wounded simultaneously is and is not Shepard’s gruesome death. This victim is also a teenager tied to a fence. But his murder occurs in a Wyoming town that is smaller, sparer, and wilder than Laramie. Wounded’s description of how the killers “stretched him out like Christ” links the killing to the long history of torture and murder based on nothing more than surface differences. Everett brings home to readers that “hate crime” isn’t about garden-variety hatred, which in fact is rarely violent. It is about intolerance so all-consuming that it pushes someone toward an utterly inhuman action.

One way that Wounded draws readers’ attention to the messiness of identity categories is its formal refusal: No one genre label fits it. The story is set on what’s left of the Western frontier, in a town with cowboys and Indians, with lawmen and ranchers. And yet it’s not a straightforward “anti-Western” like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, which deromanticize the Old West by revealing its horrors. Nor is it strictly a crime novel. Just like Everett’s most recent novel, James, it also tweaks reader’s assumptions by centering its story on Black subjects where genre conventions and literary tradition have us expecting white ones. This persistent, always-new formal deviation may be what I love most about his work. Like his 2001 novel Erasure (the basis of last year’s hit film, American Fiction), it reveals the dangers of simplifying Black or queer lives by placing them with a clear-cut insider/outsider paradigm.

The book’s characters themselves undermine expectations and embrace contradictions. John Hunt graduated with a degree in art history from UC Berkeley but decided to come to rural Wyoming to realize his dream of becoming a horse trainer. His companion there is his 79-year-old uncle Gus, a vegetarian who similarly seeks to start anew after over a decade in prison. They are the only Black people living in the area, but they feel an attraction to this place where people still call the refrigerator an “icebox” and where they fondly believe they will encounter “no Son of Sam, no LAPD, and … no neo-Nazis.” (Like 1998 me, they may have a case of “it can’t happen here.”) They are drawn there, in short, by the traditional appeal of the American West: an unchanging landscape that nonetheless offers the opportunity to reinvent oneself.

At first, Everett supplies the consequences readers cannot help yearning for after horrific bloodshed. Care and unity spring up across lines of difference. John and Gus house two gay men who come to the town to protest police apathy, and John offers to join them at their rally if they don’t mind having a “straight cowboy” alongside them. Their Matewan-style alliance grows to include nearby Native American ranchers, whose cattle are slaughtered, the n-word scrawled in the snow beside the carcasses in blood. Whoever is behind these crimes seems to be targeting anyone who is different: As John puts it, “Nobody’s got the hate market cornered in this country.” John and Gus even adopt a three-legged coyote pup, the sole survivor of a fire set by the same hatemongers who committed the other crimes.

That trajectory, though, does not hold. “The call to obligation, duty, debt, and care,” as Maggie Nelson wrote recently, “can quickly slip into something oppressively moralistic, more reliant on shame, capitulation, or assuredness of our own ethical goodness in comparison with others, than on understanding or acceptance.” Everett resists such moralizing; this burden of care sparks not only John’s and Gus’s humanity but also their animality. The book’s opening sentence, in fact, presages this outcome: “By definition a cave must have an opening large enough to allow a human to enter. … And that is what is scary about caves, that one can enter.” This evocative depiction refers, it transpires, to an actual location to which John returns repeatedly as the community violence increases. He decides, “I was a trogloxene, a creature that lives outside the cave, but returns frequently.” He explores the cavern’s depths, venturing ever deeper and using it diversely as a refuge from a storm as well as a site for seduction and erotic experimentation. “What I liked about the cave,” he reflects, “and perhaps any cave, the idea of a cave, was the place where light from outside ceased to have any influence.”

By tracing Gus’s and John’s failed attempts to evade the violent impulses that haunt their community, Wounded dramatizes how the frontier mentality in the United States fosters the potential for omnipresent aggression. Upon reading in the local newspaper that the gay man’s murder is “symptomatic of some rural or Western disease of intolerance,” John simply remarks, “Yes, it’s called America.” And it’s this very ubiquity of infection that helps the identities of the local perpetrators remain evasive. As Ta-Nehisi Coates observes about the contemporary situation: “The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice” and thus “they work best in the dark, their essence tucked away.” Everett shows how these systems are upheld not just by their shadow operators but also by the learned helplessness of those who lack the means to resist. This leaves the novel’s minority characters cloistered on their ranch, even if this impulse to isolate facilitates more interpersonal conflict and even self-harm.

Everett’s novel proposes that each of us is a survivor of the hate crimes of the world: The very existence of such violence leaves us all wounded. The ending of the novel, which brings retribution for the initial murder and the ensuing acts of violence, reminds us that we cannot escape the effects of hatred by descending underground. Like the prisoners Plato imagines chained in a cave, Everett’s characters hope to dispel shadow play through the novelist’s weapons of the weak: dialogue and self-questioning

My younger self thought (or dreamed anyway) that mere physical distance could ensure freedom from harm. Wounded, by shutting down fictions of escape, shows readers the struggle for safety is a shared one. I love this novel for the way it models the importance of admitting our precarity to others—rather than hiding it in the shadows.