The jacket copy (and pretty much any blurb I could find about Storm—published by George R. Stewart's in 1941—refers to it as the first "eco-novel."
But that term does little to capture the sprawl and scope of this strange but awesome book.
With a cast of dozens (hundreds?), Stewart takes a wide-angled view of how a major storm affects the American West.
There are snow plow drivers, meteorologists, farmers, foolish travelers, pilots, businesspeople. There are non-human characters, too—the rotten log of a tree, a hog, a chipmunk.
And, of course, the storm itself, whose growth and progress Stewart describes with an almost imperial tone, imparting a beauty to the movements and fluctuations of air and water.
The relationship between man and environment was one of Stewart's great themes, and he waxes plenty poetic at points throughout. Some of this prose is purple, sure, but that's because he's set himself a hard job—making us feel small against the enormity of nature.
