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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
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IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN

Andy Davidson

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

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.
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Book

Published 2017-06-06 by Skyhorse Publishing

Comments

"In this bold, confident debut, Davidson takes the vampire myth to 1980s West Texas, perfectly capturing the feel of the era and place . . . Davidson successfully makes the lines between genre and literary fiction bleed together in a complex novel of horror, human nature, and the American South."

"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.”