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    In the Valley of the Sun: A Novel
    Unavailable
    In the Valley of the Sun: A Novel
    Unavailable
    In the Valley of the Sun: A Novel
    Ebook412 pages6 hours

    In the Valley of the Sun: A Novel

    By Andy Davidson

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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 morningwith 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 lifeand new blood.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateJun 6, 2017
    ISBN9781510721111
    Unavailable
    In the Valley of the Sun: A Novel
    Author

    Andy Davidson

    Andy Davidson is the Bram Stoker Award–nominated author of In the Valley of the Sun and The Boatman’s Daughter. Born and raised in Arkansas, he makes his home in Georgia, where he lives with his wife, Crystal, and a bunch of cats.

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    Reviews for In the Valley of the Sun

    4/5

    30 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      WESTERN/HORRORAndy DavidsonIn the Valley of the Sun: A NovelSkyhorse PublishingHardcover, 978-1-5107-2110-4, (also available as an e-book), 384 pgs., $24.99June 6, 2017 In the autumn of 1980, drifter Travis Stillwell washes up west of the Pecos in the fictional town of Cielo Rojo, Texas. After a surreal night at a local watering hole where he meets Rue, a young woman with “skin … light as bone, her hair as red as a fortunate sky,” Stillwell wakes covered in blood inside the camper on his rattletrap pickup, parked in the otherwise deserted lot of the Sundowner Inn, with no memory of the previous night. The old motel and its café are owned by Annabelle Gaskin, “solemn and pretty and not unlined by the life she had made here in the desert,” a young widow and mother of a ten-year-old son. She hires Stillwell to clean up the motel in barter for his stay. You’ll want to point and holler as danger walks among them unrecognized, while the Gaskin farmhouse sits atop a hill overlooking the Sundowner Inn like Norman’s manse in Psycho. In the Valley of the Sun, Andy Davidson’s debut novel, is an original synthesis of horror and Western with a dollop of police procedural. Part From Dusk Till Dawn, part Fargo, part Something Wicked This Way Comes, it bucks the trend of glamorous vampires. These aren’t Anne Rice’s Old-World vamps, nor Charlaine Harris’s Bon Temps vamps; they are distinctly American, brutally Old-West undead. If Stephen King and James Lee Burke had a love child, it would be Andy Davidson. Intricately plotted, fast-paced, packing serpentine twists, In the Valley of the Sun progresses inexorably from curious to creepy to oh-my-good-lord-somebody-DO-something. Davidson gifts his characters nuanced backstories, informing their motivations and choices. Two Texas Rangers provide comedic relief as the veteran schools his junior partner. Subplots add dimension without clutter. Ironically, we meet Annabelle on the day of her baptism, another way to be renewed by blood.Minimal detail subtly anchors the stark West Texas setting with its mesquite, arroyos, pumpjacks “plunging and rearing like giant birds tearing at the land,” and the red Pegasus taking flight from a defunct Mobil Oil station. Third-person narratives alternate between hunter and quarry; sometimes the two switch places. There’s a cadence to Davidson’s sentences, his arresting phrases. In New Orleans, Rue’s enhanced senses “taste the dirt between the sidewalk pavers, the green grass growing up through the cracks, the salt in the air, the bogs and muddy slick lizard stink of alligators miles away.” In another passage, “A sudden inexplicable sense of the universe in total, a God’s-eye view of all the strands that formed the web,” seizes the veteran Ranger. “Some were straight and true, and others made patterns without purpose, as if the weaver were lost or drunk or simple.” There’s your Burke. Relentless momentum bounding toward the climactic scenes had me unconsciously holding my breath, consciously trying to stop my eyes from straying furtively to the next page. The payoff is satisfying and unexpectedly graceful. In the Valley of the Sun is a powerful, audacious debut.Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.
    • 4/5
      A well written, often graphic, vampire-ish story. These aren't your typical vampires and the cross of a serial killer and vampire was an interesting twist but it wasn't fully realized. However, I was left feeling quite sad after finishing. Everyone important loses something of value. For most, it's their lives. I still think the book would have been a compelling read with a couple of redemptive elements. I know that good doesn't always triumph over evil, but a little good surviving would have been nice (besides the characters that live).
    • 4/5
      A disclaimer - I don't read horror, and only picked this up because I met the author at an event. That being said, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed In the Valley of the Sun. The author has a nearly poetic style of writing. His descriptions of the west Texas landscape were beautifully done. The story has what I imagine is obligatory gore in horror, but what kept me reading were the characters. I cared what was happening, or about to happen, or what I feared would happen, to them. The build-up to the nail-biting ending created genuine tension. I hope to see more novels from this talented author.
    • 2/5
      This was just too slow and draggy for me.