“Blood Up North reads like a runaway freight train straight out of a Coen Brothers movie. Soukup delivers a rush on every page. A riveting rollercoaster ride of a novel.”

“If Cormac McCarthy wrote the screenplay for Winter’s Bone, then it would certainly read as unabashedly visceral and courageous as Soukup’s masterful Blood Up North. The novel is both elegy and witness; like the Roman god Janus, it looks forward and backwards at the same time—backwards at the evaporation of the time-honored ways of rural life, and forward to the modern forces of dissolution caused by the opioid epidemic. The genealogical labyrinth of Soukup’s fictional Backus, Minnesota, and the hardscrabble survivors and victims who populate its austere landscape of rotting barns and dive bars comes to life in rich and unflinching prose that burns going down like moonshine and branchwater whiskey. Cass, the heroine of the book, is a survivor for our time, perhaps for all time.”

“Set in the dead of winter in rural Minnesota, Blood Up North centers on a tight but untrustworthy family all pitted against each other in hopes of revealing past secrets and a stolen stash of money. Soukup’s dark and creepy characters lie, steal, abuse, and occasionally love. This chilling and smart novel is part mystery, part family drama, and all about the struggles of living in an unforgiving climate encased in a cold and harsh family of deceit. Beautifully written and engaging until the last word.”

“Fredrick Soukup’s thriller, set in the frigid, unforgiving winter of Minnesota’s Northwoods, tells the tragic tale of generations torn apart by drug addiction, poverty, and violence. Soukup’s sharply drawn characters and stark landscape descriptions draw you in as the novel’s scrappy protagonist Cass, a girl of nineteen, on a quest to uncover the truth, tries to fight her way out of the doomed life she’s born into.”

“Soukup spins a cold, bitter tale of family secrets and terrible truths set in a world that erupts with sudden violence and tenderness in equal measure. Throw on your parka and enjoy the ride!”

“Fredrick Soukup is proving himself a master of compelling narratives — convincing, gripping, captivating narratives — that are peopled by characters who by their very situation and nature inspire pity, anger and an understanding of the human condition that both binds and destroys families and relationships. These are the constants in Blood Up North, Soukup’s second novel set in rural Minnesota where backcountry life is marked by a disturbing malevolence (that is) at the forefront of a young woman’s moral and emotional struggle to escape. His storyline and characters are made real through writing alive with vivid descriptions and conversation that stay with one after the reading is finished.”

“The tension in Fredrick Soukup’s Blood Up North is so taut you’ll want to keep reading for the relief of its release. From the moment young Cassandra (Cass) Schmidt’s drug-addled big brother, Jack, drags her into a heist gone haywire, and right through to the point where the elusive truth bubbles up from the tale’s bloodied depths, Soukup keeps the heat on. The blood of the title is that of a family so disfigured by mendacity that Soukup’s protagonist has little choice but to trade in her search for truth for a lust for vengeance, the latter being much more reliably attained. This is a dark, harrowing tale handled with a zeal for the physical, for the body’s response to bullets or bitter cold or drugs, for actions and their consequences, that will appeal to fans of books like Chris Offut’s Country Dark or Ian McQuire’s The North Water.”