Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

DESERT CREATURES

Kay Chronister

A feminist horror Western told with ferocious imagination and style by an on-the-rise Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Award nominated writer.

Exiled from their home, nine-year-old Magdala and her father Xavier flee through the Sonoran Desert, settling in a community of survivalists who measure human value in labor output. When violence tears the community apart, Magdala and Xavier join a handful of survivors on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Las Vegas. Magdala, born with a clubfoot, is going to be healed at the altar of a vigilante saint. However, when faced with the privations and strange horrors of the desert, Magdala's journey takes her further from salvation even as she nears the holy city.
Kay Chronister is an award-winning writer of dark and speculative fiction. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Black Static, and The Dark. Her short fiction collection, Thin Places, was published in 2020 and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award and a World Fantasy Award. Currently a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of Arizona, she researches romance, folklore, and politics in eighteenth-century Britain.

Available products
Book Published 2022-11-01 by Erewhon Books

Comments

Kay Chronister has crafted an incredible setting, pushing the wild weirdness of the Sonoran Desert toward the furthest extremes of possibility. I will never forget this uncanny world, nor brave Magdala's quest across it, contending with holy saints and hellish killers in a landscape whose every inch and inhabitant is as dangerous as they are in dire need of healing.

Titan Books

This exciting debut was named one of the top ten science fiction, fantasy & horror titles of the fall by Publisher's Weekly. Read more...

If The Canterbury Tales was set in future Sonoran and Mojave deserts, it might look a little like this . . . [A] strange and frightening vision. Publishers Weekly

Existing at the sweet spot where A Canticle for Leibowitz and Blood Meridian meet, Chronister's Desert Creatures is a vivid investigation of faith, perseverance, and human violence as they exist at the end of the world. A scintillating first novel.