THE MARCHLANDS

"Tom spoke up then to tell them that this was all still and only a marchland, still and only an untamed place between countries where men might walk but no laws followed. He said it would take blood and fire and metal to make this country anything but a wild marchland but that men would do it because that was what men always did: brought blood and fire and metal with them wherever they went."

Lance Weller's second novel is the story of such a place, set in the pre-Civil War 1840s, a time of American expansion westward when venturing beyond the defined borders of the United States was akin to stepping off into a moral void, a lawless, barely-charted marchland, a cauldron visited regularly by violence and atrocity. The American marchland was ferociously contested by pioneers, outlaws, Indian tribes, the US Army, runaway slaves, scalp hunters, and dispossessed Mexican nationals, each vainly staking their claim to a piece of it only to be challenged by another claimant. Into this savage land rides Tom Hawkins, a killer before his 18th birthday, with Pigsmeat Spence, the haunted participant in the massacre of squaws and native children during the Black Hawk War, a man still mourning the loss of his beloved wife, and Flora, the beautiful slave whored out by her now-dead master and herself a killer of men, each of them together seeking to make his or her own way in the world, to pursue their elusive dreams of freedom.

AMERICAN MARCHLAND is an extraordinary work of fiction, moving and dramatic, with artfully drawn, unforgettable characters, a novel that, like Weller's debut WILDERNESS, will be favorably compared with the novels of Cormac McCarthy.

Lance Weller is the author of the critically-acclaimed and commercially successful WILDERNESS. In addition, he has published short fiction in several literary journals.