The Silver Snarling Trumpet

The Silver Snarling Trumpet is written in what reads, at times, like ersatz Proust. Sleeping and waking up, and the experiences of those two states, constitute many scenes. There's a near-metaphysical focus on the quality of a certain day, a mood, a light; the book's point-of-view feels somewhere between childlike and mystical . . . It feels to me like part of an archive that's more appealing to the average reader than the compendium of ephemera and historical material that exists about and around the Grateful Dead. It isn't the kind of exacting, in-the-weeds account that might excite an obsessive. Rather, with its periods of alternating anticipation and disillusionment, The Silver Snarling Trumpet captures something about youth, what youth feels like and especially felt like then.

Hunter nicely captures the excitement of youth, when everything feels new and possibilities seem endless