Forthcoming in May 2025 by Melville House Books
Yee-Haw! I done been in a wild-west media bubble these last few weeks. Finishing Yellowstone and its spinoffs, then restarting Red Dead Redemption 2, and now I’ve taken a trip to a really wild and especially weird west in Frederic S. Durbin’s upcoming novel The Country Under Heaven.
I was initially going to take my time with this one. I’ve got a lot on my reading pile, and it won’t be out for a few more months, but I decided to read the first chapter and see if it gripped me. I don’t mind saying that it did more than grip me, it grabbed hold of me and shook me for all I was worth like a mechanical bull. The opening chapter, of a visit by our protagonist Ovid Vesper to the travelling attraction of a Dr Bellerophon Cinch (great name), was so engrossing I decided to move it to the top of my pile.
The book follows Ovid Vesper, a former Union army soldier, and his horse Jack across western era America as he tries to find his place in the world and crucially, helps others along the way. It is these relationships that Ovid forms and has formed before the novel’s start that drive the narrative. A far cry from the lone hero with no name, Ovid is rarely alone, and it seems a lot of people know his name.
Ovid suffers from visions that both spur him onwards and help him in times of trouble. Along with the visions he is seemingly stalked by a Craither, a creature brought forth from another world when he was wounded at the Battle of Antietam, the incident that caused his visions to start. The Craither often finds itself in the midst of Ovid’s journey, standing in the periphery, though even its mere presence affects Ovid.
I read the book in a few days, and it is a testament to the easy style of writing employed by Frederic S. Durbin that I did. The language was both down to earth and poetic in that way that westerns often are, as though the rough and ready heroes of the time are struggling to put into words both the horrors and beauty of their new land.
A lot of these horrors are supernatural in nature, as befits a fantasy novel, but so many of them are human, from a gang of outlaws that ambush Ovid, to the civil war itself, still raw in the minds of the novel’s characters and locations.
It is the civil war that is the impetus of the novel, with Ovid’s visions and the connections he made during that time at the forefront of the narrative. Later in the book, there’s a conversation about reconstruction and it’s hard not to take that as a metaphor for Ovid reconstructing his life after the trauma he has endured during and since the war.
I won’t give away the ending, but it is everything I wanted all the way through, but thought I’d never get. Though Jack, the best horse in the west, doesn’t quite get an ending, he just disappears from the narrative shortly before the end. It may seem like a minor problem, but Jack has been with us all the way through the novel and is a good horse, a very good horse, so deserves a nice sentence or two.
If I had another gripe at all it was the lack of Native American representation. In a novel about eldritch horrors and long dead civilisations I’d have imagined at least a few Native American characters but apart from the occasional mention that they exist, I don’t recall them being present and that is a shame.
It is my first Frederic S. Durbin novel and if anything, it’s made me want to read his back-catalogue so that can’t be a bad thing. It’s definitely one of my favourite reads of the year so far and I’d recommend reading it when it comes out.
Thanks to Melville House U.K. for providing an advanced copy for review.