The Country Under Heaven
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"Best Books of 2025: Science Fiction" Award—The Financial Times
"A Best Horror Book of the Year"—New York Public Library
Louis L’Amour meets H.P. Lovecraft in this thrilling western epic about a former Civil War soldier wracked by enigmatic visions . . .
Set in the 1880s, the story follows Ovid Vesper, a former Union soldier who has been having enigmatic visions after surviving one of the Civil War’s most gruesome battles, the Battle of Antietam. As he travels across the country following those visions, he finds himself in stranger and increasingly more dangerous encounters with other worlds hidden in the spaces of his own mind, not to mention the dangers of the Wild West.
Ovid brings his steady calm and compassion as he helps the people of a broken country, rapidly changing but, like himself, still reeling and wounded from the war. He assists with matters of all sorts, from odd jobs around the house, to guiding children back to their own universe, to hunting down unnatural creatures that stalk the night — all the while seeking his own personal resolution and peace from his visions.
Ovid’s epic journey across the American West with a surprising cast of characters blends elements of the classic Western with historical fantasy in a way like no other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Durbin (A Green and Ancient Light) skillfully combines cosmic horror tropes with American frontier fiction in this standout historical horror novel set in the Old West. Union Army soldier Ovid Vesper survives the Civil War, but at a cost; following a near-death experience in the Battle of Antietam, he sees an unnatural being that he dubs the Craither, describing the visions as "like I wasn't really beholding the thing itself, but the way it bent the world by being there." He's horrified by this apparition he alone can see and assailed by guilt, believing that his return to consciousness after the battle is what enabled the Craither to enter the world, "like someone ducking through a door behind you while it's open." Vesper encounters the Craither multiple times over the following years as he wanders the country investigating supernatural oddities, such as a man who was fatally mauled by some unknown beast in Texas and the bizarre appearance of two entirely green children in Missouri. The cases are distinct and fascinating, and Durbin's vivid prose makes both Vesper and the colorful cast that surrounds him come alive. This is Lovecraftian fiction at its finest.
