Summary
Summary
A finalist for the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.
Deftly written and utterly addictive, this Western literary horror debut will find a home with fans of authors like Joe Hill, Cormac McCarthy, and Anne Rice.
One night in 1980, a man becomes a monster.
Haunted by his past, Travis Stillwell spends his nights searching out women in West Texas honky-tonks. What he does with them doesn't make him proud, just quiets the demons for a little while. But after Travis crosses paths one night with a mysterious pale-skinned girl, he wakes weak and bloodied in his cabover camper the next morning--with no sign of a girl, no memory of the night before.
Annabelle Gaskin spies the camper parked behind her motel and offers the cowboy a few odd jobs to pay his board. Travis takes her up on the offer, if only to buy time, to lay low and heal. By day, he mends the old motel, insinuating himself into the lives of Annabelle and her ten-year-old son. By night, in the cave of his camper, he fights an unspeakable hunger. Before long, Annabelle and her boy come to realize that this strange cowboy is not what he seems.
Half a state away, a grizzled Texas Ranger is hunting Travis for his past misdeeds, but what he finds will lead him to a revelation far more monstrous. A man of the law, he'll have to decide how far into the darkness he'll go for the sake of justice.
When these lives converge on a dusty autumn night, an old evil will find new life--and new blood.
Author Notes
Andy Davidson holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi. His work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Carve magazine, the Santa Clara Review , and other journals. He lives in Georgia with his wife.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this bold, confident debut, Davidson takes the vampire myth to 1980s West Texas, perfectly capturing the feel of the era and place. Travis Stillwell is hardly a good man; he's strangled multiple women with his belt. But when a vampire named Rue turns him and strands him in a motel parking lot, he resists killing the model's widowed owner, Annabelle, or her young son, Sandy. This frustrates Rue, who has wandered for decades before finding someone as violent as Travis and needs him to embrace his inner beast. Meanwhile, a Texas Ranger named Reader is hunting Travis down, unaware of the change he's undergone. Davidson lets his story play out slowly, using multiple points of view and long flashbacks to explore the perspectives and histories of his various protagonists. The obligatory violence becomes an organic, inevitable result of the needs of the characters coming into conflict. Davidson successfully makes the lines between genre and literary fiction bleed together in a complex novel of horror, human nature, and the American South. Agent: Elizabeth Copps, Maria Carvainis Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Rural Texas, 1980. Travis is not a good man haunted by his violent past, he takes it out on the women he meets. One night, however, a girl leaves him bloodied and weak in his trailer, and he wakes with an inability to tolerate daylight and a strange and overpowering hunger. When a widow and her young son see the trailer in the parking lot of their roadside motel, they offer the sickly cowboy some work around the place. The three lonely souls strike up an awkward friendship, but not for long, because a veteran Texas Ranger is following a trail of dead girls that leads right up to Travis' doorstep. This is not your typical vampire novel, rather it is actually a lyrical modern western, with a large dose of suspense. Everyone has a secret, and no one is completely innocent. The story drips with atmosphere, and the plot and the characters will play with readers' minds. Hand this hauntingly dark, yet oddly beautiful debut to fans of literary psychological suspense who don't mind a touch of the supernatural, and especially target fans of the film Hell or High Water and the novels of Cormac McCarthy or Stephen Graham Jones. This is one that readers won't easily forget after turning the final page.--Spratford, Becky Copyright 2017 Booklist