Ten Sleep cover reveal & brief discussion of the American West
Reactor Magazine reveals eco-horror illustration by Brynn Metheney
Illustrator and concept artist Brynn Metheney, expert in animal anatomy and creature design for films such as Ghostbusters: Afterlife, MIB: International, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, has illustrated the cover of my new eco-horror novel, Ten Sleep (Erewhon Books). As revealed in Reactor Magazine, the cover is dark, lush, and offers a glimpse of the mysterious mother canyon, as well as Greta Molina, and a giant condor-like bird.
A modern day take on western fiction in a monster-filled, ten-day cattle drive, Ten Sleep both embraces and is repulsed by settler deeds done in the American West. The novel opens with an unknown narrator discussing Wyoming land disputes in the early 1900s. It’s sheepherders vs. cattlemen, where a ruthless range detective hired by cattle barons inflicts misery on encroaching sheepherders, and himself enters a bizarre and violent transformation from stolen canyon magic. It’s a creepy family history as well, borne of colonial plunder and violence. The majority of the novel takes place more than a hundred years later and follows three unlikely friends on a cattle drive from the town of Ten Sleep into the area’s lovely and timeless canyons. What the herders find is murder in the rocks, and an ancient history of blood rites that they can’t escape. There will be a prairie dog or two. And a bear who loses something precious.
So, yeah, been thinking about the American West for a few years now while working with Erewhon Books’ editors Diana Pho and Viengsamai Fetters. Like, literally been sucked into the American West’s violent history, strange presentness, flora and fauna, geologic uniqueness, and been writing characters, animals, landscapes, etc. Really been trying to figure out what it means when you weave elements of western fiction, horror, eco-horror, and sci-fi together into one big messy story about transformations and time. I think I’ve figured out something you might like . . .
But let’s talk about Westerns. Goodness. Haven’t read a ton of western fiction, though Cormac McCarthy, sure. Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and whatnot. Some Louis L’Amour, even some Mark Spragg, and a lot of Stephen Graham Jones. The Only Good Indians is a horror-western for sure. Probably everything of SGJ’s that I’ve read overlaps with elements of western fiction. Should we throw in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine? Counting it. Can’t stop me.
Seen a million TV shows and films. From every episode of Bonanza and The Big Valley, to films such as Stagecoach, 3:10 to Yuma, and Tombstone—“I’m your huckleberry.” The list is long, too long, endless movie watching especially in the 1970s with Mom. RIP, young lady. And where TV is concerned, also watched Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, The Lone Ranger, a lot of Roy Rogers, every episode of Little House on the Prairie, some of that Yellowstone too. I do think that Reservation Dogs is the shit.
Back in the 1990s I took courses on the American West. Too long ago to remember every detail, though I do recall some of the lectures, the names of some of the books, and a historian obsessed with his own Dust Bowl book. He boasted in class over and over that Jim Carrey was attached to the selling of film rights. Fast forward ten years to 2001, and that slow-moving news was finally hitting Variety. Fast forward twenty-four more years to today, that flick still hasn’t been made. Perhaps just another Frontier myth. That retired professor is eighty-three now. Doubt he’s given up on Jim Carrey. Probably still expects that addictive dose of Hollywood fame.
Ten Sleep is a novel of the American West. How do I begin a definition? In early America, the West might have simply been the western half of an east coast territory, or town, or fort, or a line of mountains like the Appalachians, or could have been used as a word to describe the unknown, the West, the Wilderness, that land where savage hearts and the Devil dwelled. All of it unfair to indigenous peoples.
And what could the West have meant to indigenous peoples already nested within North America? Maybe it was simply where the sun set and ended each day, a symbol for the end of a life, the end of a season, or a harvested crop. Maybe the West was from where the rains came, from where resources poured and wended across landscapes.
As America grew, so did our concept of the West. The American West became lands west of the Mississippi, or another dividing line that includes Canada west of Ontario and all of Mexico, and maybe for some, simply becomes the story of water scarcity in deserts, or dislocated peoples replaced with white settlements, or lost histories of indigenous inhabitants whose languages have mostly disappeared, whose pictographs and petroglyphs, scarce though they are, have been raided and often lost in translation, the same as some of our own family photographs. Maybe the West was a way of life that is no more, one hard to see through the veil of frontier myths. Dad was a trucker, part of the cowboy myth. Dressed the part too. Sorry, Dad, you’ll always be part myth to me.
Frontier myths deluded people into thinking of a divinely ordained manifest destiny, and the heroic lone, rugged individual who could conquer anyone or anything with self-reliance and nothing else. So many stereotypes and tropes, too many to name, and coming at us again these days in a new era of landform conquest—an entire Gulf of Mexico in name change only, all of Greenland, the Panama Canal, all of Canada. We’re deep in a new frontier myth with a manifest destiny more ridiculous than the first go-round.
I hope Ten Sleep can be a brief respite from the real world, though you might see a glimpse or two of America today. After all, wouldn’t be me not to throw in some social commentary about culture, settlerism, and what the American West might mean to a dual ethnic young lady who just wants to get back with her partner who ghosted her.
Once again, the official cover reveal is in Reactor Magazine. Lots of links when you click “buy book” that will lead you to preorder pages from various booksellers. Please please consider a preorder. Thanks for your time. Talk to you again soon.
