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Author: Tod Newman

  • Indie Book Review: J.R. Larriba’s “Itsy Bitsy Spider: Evolution

    Indie Book Review: J.R. Larriba’s “Itsy Bitsy Spider: Evolution

    Occasionally I pick up books by indie writers who are getting solid reviews. I find this helps me stay a bit more tuned to the era I actually live in, but I also like supporting people with my reviews who have a vision, the compulsion to write the story of what they can see, and the discipline to jump through all the many challenges thrown up for writers who want to self-publish or publish through an indie press. This book is an excellent example of this kind of ambitious, vision-driven work.

    Synopsis

    Itsy Bitsy Spyder: Evolution opens as a fog-choked Marin County procedural—a burned-out detective, a string of impossible murders, a witness who is deaf and blind and somehow the only one who saw anything true—before it sheds its genre skin entirely and reveals a cosmology of buried gods, inherited guilt, and a war being fought in the space between what people believe is real and what horrors actually moved through their house last night. As it turns out, Larriba isn’t interested in a clean mystery; he’s interested in what happens when grief discovers its monster wearing a face that is shockingly familiar. Readers who want their horror operatic, myth-soaked, and ambivalent about protecting the expected procedural scaffolding will find a book built for them.

    Technical Assessment

    The plot’s ambition is real: fusing a Bay Area crime lab story with Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican myth, and folding a 1100 AD timeline into a 2025 one via a shared cursed artifact, is an infrequently-seen combination, and the two threads do converge with believability rather than gesture.

    Thematically the book is strongest where it’s most specific—Sofia’s arc, in which a supernaturally restored sense of sight becomes something to mourn rather than celebrate, is the novel’s best idea and reveals some true character interiority. I found it compelling. Other character work is uneven: Krill’s grief is carried by consistent, recurring imagery (the coin, the sycamores, the cat) rather than stated clearly and dropped, which creates a gravity that is heavily leaned on. Ortega and Dex are comparatively thin, useful mostly for exposition and banter, though Dex’s parallel-hell backstory surprises the character himself and retroactively earns him more sympathy than the middle chapters suggest he deserves. Pacing sags in the middle third, where set-piece horror sequences (the owl nest, the deer-pit ambush) accumulate faster than the plot advances, and the late-book pivot—turning two characters, previously sympathetic, into instruments of the antagonist—will read as either a bold genre swing or a bait-and-switch depending on how closely a reader was tracking the foreshadowing: it doesn’t come across as cheating, but it isn’t gentle either.

    Comparisons

    Larriba’s work is hard to describe—his prose consists of stacked fragments and em-dash driven accumulations of short bursts of information. Sometimes it flows brilliantly. The novel also explores how actions from the distant past directly influence the present-day “crime noir” story that the novel presents itself as initially. Reconsidering how Larriba pulls this off is a worthwhile and enjoyable activity.

    Perhaps surprisingly, the reading eventually brought to mind one of my favorite works of Faulkner—Absalom, Absalom!—and surfaced some solid comparisons and contrasts.

    Absalom, Absalom! is at its fundamental core all about buried ancestral influence—Sutpen’s sin that was planted generations back that reaches forward in time and destroys everyone downstream, even those with no knowledge of their poisonous inheritance. Larriba is structurally taking this approach too: Sofia’s line, Krill’s family, Dex, and indeed the whole valley are caught up in something planted long before any of them existed—so long, in fact, that it extends in part back to the Sumerian empire and the Tower of Babel. The horror that Larriba unveils is not really the murders—they’re shocking at first, but are quickly exceeded by the knowledge that the present is not free from the evil of the past. Both Faulkner and Larriba make good use of their unique landscapes as a holder of that buried history: the darkness of the rotting Sutpen’s Hundred homestead and the fog-choked valley are working this narrative relentlessly. This is the Gothic ideal coming out in both writers—making the place complicit in the darkness.

    Larriba’s prose density accomplishes something different than Faulkner, however. Faulkner’s goal in Absalom is to use a rambling maximalist syntax to make the past sins unknowable and the varied recountings of them unreliable—yet progressively revealing what can actually be known. Larriba uses a similar style in dense description, instead, to make the present known but unbearable. Two very different distinctions. Both writers are swimming in the Gothic tradition of ancestral curse and haunted terrain, but Faulkner wrote an epistemological novel that appeared Gothic while Larriba’s is a sensory-horror novel borrowing Gothic’s primary premise—the sins of the fathers.

    Conclusion

    I spent some time and energy with this novel trying to categorize it into a box I that I could articulate. First it was crime noir, then mass murderer, then conspiracy, then human-augmentation. All of these themes are present and the reader is led carefully by the hand to the categorization attempt—but eventually I stopped trying to find the book’s niche and settled on what I wrote above—sensory horror with strong Gothic flair.

    There are places where the prose takes on too heavy a shade of purple and disrupts flow. And often there are unusual words that get over-leveraged (“glyph” and “rune”, among others). But it always seemed that at the point I noticed the breaking of flow, if I pushed through it for a few more sentences it could be regained. Just the same as with Faulkner.

    Did Larriba write a novel worthy of his Gothic predecessors? I think they would have recognized him as a neighbor working in the same beloved fields. Does it have the greatness of Faulkner’s best works? No, not yet, but perhaps someday.

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  • James D. Houck – Mail Carrier, Prospector, Trader, Lawman, Sheepherder, Arizona state legislator.

    James D. Houck – Mail Carrier, Prospector, Trader, Lawman, Sheepherder, Arizona state legislator.

    James Houck is another in a breed who drifted west in the late 1800’s to Arizona Territory—a man who was a walking contradiction. He fought in the Civil War with a Wisconsin regiment and prospected in Wyoming and Colorado before settling in Arizona at the age of 23.

    The Early Life – Ambitious and Optimistic

    At twenty-three, Houck settled in Arizona Territory relying on his Civil War experience and some failed prospecting ventures. Like my main character, Nora, from my current The Rim Country series, he came west with all his belongings packed on a mule or burro. Both of them came west with little margin searching for a new life. Nora sought a business that would be important to her community; Houck seems to have sought quick wealth.

    Early on, he got a contract with the Army to carry mail between Fort Whipple and Fort Wingate—dangerous work due to the dry, waterless terrain and the ever-present risk of attacks by the natives. He held this contract three years, then used what he’d learned of the country and its people to establish a trading post on the Puerco River, betting correctly that the railroad would come through and make his fortune. It is likely that his Navajo neighbors taught him the sheep business here.

    The bet paid off. When the railroad arrived, Houck had already built water tanks for the steam engines to be topped off—his trading post became a scheduled stop. A settlement grew up around it taking his name: “Houck’s Tank”.

    From there Houck again moved on, up into the higher country around Springerville and Heber, where he established a ranch and raised both cattle and sheep and was elected to represent Apache County as a state legislator. It was an uncomfortable position to hold two ways at once—a sheepman caught between the wealthy Flagstaff sheep interests, the Aztec Land and Cattle Company’s holdings around Holbrook, and the growing cattle business taking shape in Pleasant Valley below the Rim, all of it held in an uneasy truce that kept sheep from crossing into cattle country at the boundary of the Rim itself.

    Deputy Sheriff Houck Complicates the Pleasant Valley war

    In his early forties, Houck was recruited or volunteered to serve under the well-known lawman Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens of Apache County. It’s unclear why he chose this thankless job, but in time he was embedded down in Pleasant Valley advertising that he was officially sent to help curtail the range war between the cattlemen and the sheepmen. Since he was a sheepman himself, there was much suspicion that he was aligned on one side of the battle. The record shows that he was involved in extrajudicial killings of multiple men solely connected to the cattle ranching side of the war—and that most likely he lied repeatedly to cover it up. There’s no evidence that he ever had warrants for these men. The record indicates he was operating more as a mercenary but with a badge.

    In 1900, thirteen years after the Pleasant Valley war, Houck bought Cave Creek station, north of Phoenix, and developed it as a shearing camp for sheepmen. His general store was built of rock, solid and a local reference point. He filled his time by jumping back into enforcing the law in Maricopa County and getting some mail routes. Eventually Cave Creek—and the Houck Ranch—became sought after by tuberculars looking for better weather.

    Houck saw a downturn in his fortune as a drought and persistent overgrazing brought Cave Creek down to a trickle and many of the folks moved away. Houck got divorced, remarried, and eventually closed his store. The King of Cave Creek was broken and took a fatal dose of strychnine at age 75.

    Houck in “The Rim Country” Book Two

    In the second book of the Rim Country series, Houck makes an appearance. Consistent with the best analysis (Arizona’s Dark and Bloody Ground, by Earle R. Forrest) that sifted through the oft-contradictory primary sources, Houck was aligned with the Tewksbury family and may have used his badge in the valley without the knowledge of Sheriff Owens in St. Johns. This is how I write him. He made claims to have warrants that history is fairly clear that he didn’t have—Owens had a hard time getting warrants even for the Blevins boys himself. Doubtful the judge ever gave him a warrant for the Grahams.

    I show Houck going through the valley looking for information—something it seems likely he would have done for a while. When William Graham—John’s little brother—is murdered, I write the story of Houck taking credit for it, knowing that the lawless conditions in the valley plus his official position will protect him. I also speculate in the book, due to some reports that William Graham indicated he was shot by a Tewksbury, that Houck was covering for one of his Tewksbury friends—possibly Ed. We’ll never know for sure, but what we do know is that Houck’s time in Pleasant Valley created undue chaos. I attempt to show this confusion through the eyes of multiple characters.

    How was the valley confused? Houck was hunting Grahams at the same time a different county sheriff was attempting to serve warrants to the Tewksbury men for the murder of Hamp Blevins. There was also known to be a marauding band of Chiricahua Apache in the valley pillaging ranches while resisting being sent west to Florida by the U.S. Army.

    It seems clear that Houck was involved in five or six murders, including a lynching in the valley. The lynching, especially, seemed very useful to Houck’s career ambitions. Houck was found grazing sheep on the ranch of one of the victims afterwards and indicated to the victim’s mother that nothing would ever be done about the lynching. This is what the best analysis of the historical record indicates; in my novel I fill in the gaps to try to explain Houck’s motivations.

    Conclusion – How I Treat Houck in The RIm Country

    In The Rim Country: The War (1887), I work to capture all of this ambiguity about Houck. Someone who fought in the war, served the government, traded with the Navajo, and desired to be a deputy sheriff must have some redeeming qualities. But a deeper look into his life reveals a man who was inconsistent and was always looking for greener grass on the other side of the range.

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    The Rim Country Book One
    The Rim Country Book One

    More about The War They Forgot to Put in the History Books!

  • I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger: Hope Despite Inhumanity

    I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger: Hope Despite Inhumanity

    Recently I shared with someone that it was my solid opinion that Leif Enger, Marilynne Robinson, and Wendell Berry were among the greatest living American writers.

    That was said while I was in the middle of reading Enger’s mesmerizing I Cheerfully Refuse, his most recently published book. I have been so pleased with his previous books, that I felt overjoyed with the chance to read another. To me that’s the mark of a great writer—I look forward to reading and even re-reading their books.

    I Cheerfully Refuse has some of the same characteristics that Enger uses to drive the plot of his other novels. Engaging characters, an important journey to regain something lost, moments of despair when the character’s situation seems impossible to overcome, and joy in the resolution. Enger doesn’t wallow in the despair but eventually points to a slightly reimagined joy. This is not shallow or condescending—Enger has just set his eyes higher upon things he believes to be true. He is not post-modern and certainly is the opposite of nihilist.

    Revising The Road by McCarthy

    Throughout this book, my mind returned to the dystopian future of post-destruction spelled out in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (find my review HERE). Though many reviewers have clearly gotten trapped in the futility and despair that McCarthy paints, he is careful to outline small but detectable glimmers of hope. In I Cheerfully Refuse, Enger presents the same sorts of dysfunction that McCarthy portrays so ruthlessly, but has a much stronger intention to portray the hope that lies behind.

    The Errant Knight and Protector

    A frequent reference is Don Quixote, the hopeful errant knight who is called to courage and loyalty and the slaying of dragons. The main character, Rainy, who often presents as a type of Quixote in this book is nevertheless, well aware of the unromantic end of Quixote after his defeat by the Knight of the White Moon:

    A romantic fears romance is not enough. It wasn’t enough for Quixote—did you know that? I wish I’d never finished that book. Romance was a trapdoor for him and finally gave way, for the old knight lost his bold lunacy and belief in giants—without which who would’ve read his thousand pages?—and used his last moments to denounce all tales and frivolity, and died like any fretful pensioner, his concluding mission in this world ensuring his stupid will got notarized. In the end it was all churchmen and attorneys, even for Quixote. That’s what made my mouth go dry. That’s what kept me up till dawn, and I’m sorry to lay it off on you, if you didn’t know, or had managed to forget.

    – Enger, Leif. I Cheerfully Refuse

    At the point that Rainy makes this statement, he has yet to realize that he IS the romantic Don Quixote, because life will deal him many blows that he will adapt to and overcome. He will seek to protect above all, and sometimes fail and other times succeed. He notes early on in the book with reference to a bullied music student:

    It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.

    – Enger, Leif. I Cheerfully Refuse

    Throughout, though he is often tempted by the world which has fallen around him into chaos and horror, his true self sneaks through and reminds him of who he is. I sum this up with his thought that refocuses himself out of deep grief onto his mission: “Maybe now and then the windmill IS a giant.” Maybe it is, and probably we all need to remember this as well.

    Surrounded by Inhumanity

    The world Rainy is navigating is truly fallen and unfair. There has been a devastating event, that seems to have been associated with a comet. Many towns have lost their organizational structures altogether. Rainy becomes the guardian of one of the best characters in any book I’ve read recently, Sol, a nine year old whirlwind girl, but the place he finds her matches in its hopelessness anything that McCarthy presented in the worst places of The Road. She is orphaned and has somehow been passed around—most likely sold—and is now the ward of an illiterate version of the modern Skinhead. Wrapped up in far-right ideology, carrying the image of the Bible and the cross without any knowledge or interest in what they may really symbolize. Obsessed with power, self-preservation, and wealth. Rainy trades his beloved Fender bass guitar to take away Sol to a better place and the “guardian” agrees quickly. Sol becomes the daughter he was never able to have and the light of his life.

    But the theme of abject inhumanity rears up frequently in their journey to go to some far off island chain in Lake Superior on Rainy’s sailboat. It is there that a mystical experience might happen. Or it might not, but Rainy has hope. Plenty of others exist to steal that hope: a heartless drawbridge operator who charges such a high toll to cross under or over the bridge that it devastates a whole island, a sleepless pursuer who seeks to draw Rainy into his medical experimentation community anchored in a remote location on the lake, “astronauts”—the uber-rich who live in ways and places that seem like outer space to most normal people and who treat humanity as their own possession.

    Despite the theme of inhumanity to humans, there are bright points, such as when Sol reveals to Rainy that she stole the money of her abusive “guardian” before he traded her for the guitar. Rainy’s response is legendary:

    I fell silent then, and Sol sulked and wouldn’t look at me, because at the age of nine, with years of abuse already behind her, she had the flair and velocity to steal more of Richard’s money than Richard could apparently count, and I didn’t treat her like a hero for it, though she obviously was.

    – Enger, Leif. I Cheerfully Refuse

    Closing

    One theme that persists, though, is the notion of leaving something that remains. Much of this is tied up in books and bookstores and the author Molly Thorn, the title of whose rare, beloved book becomes this title of this novel. Molly Thorn has left many important things behind her and these have encouraged Rainy, his wife Lark, Sol, and even the villain in the book. Her words do not pick and choose who they will encourage. But Rainy learns that words are important. Rainy teaches Sol to write and instructs her on the importance of words:

    “Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.” Sol’s face remained far away. Her cheeks were white and hollow, but her eyes shone a bit, I was fairly sure.

    Enger, Leif. I Cheerfully Refuse

    And so we see the humanity and its effort to overcome the unfairness the only way possible. By giving back and encouraging and providing hope—even in a place where hope is scorned and rarely visible. But it’s there, and words can bring it back.

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  • Video Update on Pleasant Valley War Novel Series

    See what you think. I’m trying different ways to get the word out on how Book Two of “The Rim Country” series is coming.

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  • “A Canticle for Leibowitz” — A study of the Cycles of History and Myth

    “A Canticle for Leibowitz” — A study of the Cycles of History and Myth

    A Canticle for Leibowitz is a fascinating compilation of three linked short stories, tied together by the fictional Saint Leibowitz, an engineer who survived the nuclear war that laid waste to much of the world. Leibowitz spends his post-war life preserving books and knowledge in the face of a Luddite-like “Simplifier” mob bent on extracting revenge against the world’s intelligentsia for allowing the devastation in the first place. Ultimately, the combined three stories that make up this novel present a compelling study of the cycles of history and myth.

    Walter M. Miller Jr. wrote the novel in the 1950s, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel from the World Science Fiction Convention in 1961. Miller is someone I can understand: an engineer by training, an author by years of practice, and a man preoccupied with technology’s impact on society. He served in the military and, like many veterans, carried things from that service that haunted him. He was also drawn to themes I find myself circling back to again and again—religion, church versus state, historical symmetry, societal decay, truth, courage and sacrifice.

    So I came to this novel with real excitement. I knew how it had influenced many of today’s familiar novels and video games, and I knew the regard it’s held in among science-fiction-loving friends of mine. I’ve read that it’s the one literary masterpiece to emerge from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—reason enough, on its own, to give it my time.

    The Three Stories

    I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll tread carefully. The first of the three stories opens generations after Saint Leibowitz—not yet officially a saint in the story’s own timeframe—lived and ministered. It follows Francis, a poor, long-suffering acolyte who spends long vigils in the desert, largely as a consequence of his gift for annoying the Abbot of the monastery where the Beatus Leibowitz is venerated, and where books and scraps of “ancient” technological memorabilia are protected. A wanderer leads Francis to discover a buried nuclear shelter containing an original blueprint drawn by Leibowitz himself, back when he was still an engineer. The discovery sets off a chain of events that eventually brings Francis to the priesthood.

    What’s interesting about the second and third stories is that they echo the pattern of the first without ever feeling formulaic. The Wanderer—apparently very long-lived—reappears in each. Someone within the Abbey, generations later, remains underappreciated yet still willing to take a risk. And slowly, technology begins its return to the world, still shepherded by the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz. This is the pattern of cycles Miller’s writing keeps circling back to. Some reviewers call it recurrence; I read it more as what the social sciences term social cycle theory—a framework standing in direct opposition to social evolutionism.

    Cycles, Not Progress

    What’s the difference? Social evolutionism assumes progress projects forward indefinitely, as far as the historical eye can see. It’s a relatively recent idea, and honestly, not one history bears out very well. Social cycle theory, by contrast, is evidenced by the myths and stories found across nearly every human society. Like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m convinced these myths recur because they are imperfect reflections of an objective truth. Miller sees the same pattern at work in this novel—the conflicts between the Abbey and the “secular” world echo those experienced by the early church fathers, then later the Holy Roman Empire, and, broadly, the tension still playing out today between secular science and the church.

    Passages Worth Sitting With

    Several passages are both thoughtful and quietly devastating. In the second story, the scientist Thon Taddeo watches a peasant pass before him and Father Apollo of the Abbey, and scoffs:

    “Look at him, and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization? What do you see?”

    “The image of Christ,” grated the monsignor, surprised at his own sudden anger. “What did you expect me to see?”

    The scholar huffed impatiently. “The incongruity. Men as you can observe them through any window, and men as historians would have us believe men once were. I can’t accept it. How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?”

    “Perhaps,” said Apollo, “by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.”

    — Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (p. 165)

    A society materially great and wise, but great and wise in no other way—worth pondering for a while. Later, Thon Taddeo addresses the assembled monks at dinner about the learning he’s uncovered in their hidden archives. He speaks of a coming “new prince”—Truth—who will rule the future, and of technology’s return, the world remade in the image of the one it lost. But first, he warns:

    “And how will this come to pass?” He paused and lowered his voice. “In the same way all change comes to pass, I fear. And I am sorry it is so. It will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury, for no change comes calmly over the world.”

    — Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (p. 274)

    The monks listening demur, and when the scholar presses them on why, one answers:

    “Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power.”

    — Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (p. 274)

    Much of what the monks tell the scholar proves an accurate prediction of what continues to unfold in the novel. Eventually the story arrives at a resolution to the pain that keeps resurfacing under the kingdom of ignorance. In the third story, Abbot Zerchi imagines a conversation with Dr. Cors, a man he had clashed with over Cors’ recommendation of euthanasia for nuclear-strike victims:

    “Listen, my dear Cors, why don’t you forgive God for allowing pain? If He didn’t allow it, human courage, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice would all be meaningless things. Besides, you’d be out of a job, Cors.”

    — Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (p. 425)

    Verdict

    We arrive, in the end, at what seems to be the author’s reason for capturing this cyclical pain and suffering: without it, there is no way to speak honestly of the courage and self-sacrifice that rises to meet it.

    And that is an awfully good reason to write stories.

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  • Thoughts on the Old West: Violent, Racist, Misogynistic?

    Thoughts on the Old West: Violent, Racist, Misogynistic?

    I recently completed my first novel in the Western genre.

    I have read this novel at least ten times by now, and just finished reading the author’s proof that I received in the mail. I feel somewhat guilty about really enjoying this book—surely I’m biased and am missing something.

    One thing I consciously chose to avoid in this novel—the first in a series of three that is going to explore the terrible things that happened in the Pleasant Valley range war of 1880’s Arizona Territory—is graphic violence of the sort that our culture enjoys in the abstract sense provided by books and movies. Perhaps this is because modern America is unfamiliar with real violence. In my novel, when the first few murders of the range war occur, they happen off stage—still incredibly impactful to the community, but not graphically represented for the reader. I’m doing this on purpose, but I will need to adjust this stylistically as the range war erupts and chaos starts to take over. I’m pondering how to do this in a consistent way.

    My main character is a pretty unusual one. She becomes our guide to the humanity and the inhumanity behind the cause of this range war. She is a widow who had plans to go to Arizona before her husband passed away suddenly. Very unusual case. I have considered if she’s too unusual, but then I remember my grandma and my great-grandma and their hard, adventurous people, and I think maybe she’s not completely unreal.

    One thing in the first book I intentionally showed was how the ranch community welcomed her and admired what she brought to the community. She’s tough and unbending—even while silently grieving a recently dead husband. She has great powers of observation. She counts things and remembers them. She works on the small plot that she bought with the first proceeds from her freighting business—driving small numbers of cattle and hauling goods between the isolated valley and the two closest towns—each of which is over eighty miles away.

    I made a point to reflect a culture we no longer remember where men showed respect to women, particularly women they admired. I also am trying to show a historically representative ranching culture where Anglos expanding to the west interact with families who had moved north from Mexico generations earlier. In my book, just like in the world of my grandparents, these two different cultures have the general tendency to appreciate each other and each other’s traditions.

    I read an interview with Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”) recently where he felt over-focused on the “badness” of the American West. He stated his goal was to “demythologize” the West, mostly because he believed that “The history of our country is a violent history, a racist history, and a misogynistic history. It wouldn’t be correct, politically or otherwise, to paint it as civilized.”

    Though I love his characters and books while disagreeing with the decisions he made in them, I wonder if it’s the place of any author to “demythologize” history. Especially if we are doing this from within the comfortable boundaries of our own mythologies. My objective is to present the history accurately and with as little of my twenty-first century bias as I can manage.

    I think about the mythology of the 1880’s in the West. The mythology of my Great Great Grandfather, who sold a horse to Jesse James after fighting in a Civil War on the opposite side of Jesse. Who built a small farm despite pressure from outlaws, dangerous wildlife, and disease and loss. I suspect we have exaggerated the more brutal aspects of his mythology for our own entertainment, but they were certainly a part of it.

    In interviews, McMurtry admitted that though he had intended “Lonesome Dove” to “demythologize” the West, he quickly recognized that he had only accomplished the opposite. “Lonesome Dove,” which had been intended to be a long critique of western mythology, had become the chief source of western mythology. So when I write this book about the Old West, I try to do something different: navigate the place between the wilder parts of their era without forgetting the basic humanity they held, which in many ways was stronger than our own.

    This “navigation” will be a good challenge as I move into the rest of the story, though. Stay tuned for Book Two in “The Rim Country,” where things begin to drift out of control and new players emerge with their own objectives and goals.

    Find Book One of “The Rim Country” at the links below:

    The Rim Country: Book One, ‘The Invitation’ (paperbook)

    The Rim Country: Book One, ‘The Invitation’ (ebook)

  • A New Home for My Roman and Celtic Fantasy Fiction

    A New Home for My Roman and Celtic Fantasy Fiction

    Third century Rome. Emperor Valerian is hunting down church leaders. In the middle of it, a Damascus street thief named Amal discovers he can reshape reality itself — and the discovery makes him a target.

    That’s where The Halls of the Shadow King: The Apprentice begins. It’s the first book in a series I’ve spent over ten years researching and writing: historical fiction grounded in the third-century Roman Empire, with a supernatural, magical realism thread running through it—the notion that there’s an undercurrent to reality we’d call magic if we could sense it, and that the old myths might have been pointing at something real all along. I think I picked this up in my early years from C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, and even Stephen Lawhead.

    Amal’s story is about gifts of power and what it costs. About what it means to prepare yourself and to serve something greater than yourself when the world is asking you to be small, careful, and safe instead. I feel this is a message we need to hear now more than ever.

    I write these books hoping they land in the hands of the right reader—someone who needs a story about courage, risk, and cost. That’s a harder thing to aim for on a platform built for volume rather than connection. So Desdichado Books is making a change.

    Starting now, The Apprentice is no longer available through Amazon. Over time, the rest of the series — Into Deeper Waters, The Hidden Order, Britannia Calls, and possibly even the connected novelettes—will move the same direction. Going forward, you’ll find these books in two places online: todnewman.com/shop and desdichadobooks.com/bookstore. And also in any bookstores willing to take the plunge.

    Why leave a platform with that much reach? Because reach isn’t the same as connection. On Amazon, a sale is a sale—I never know who bought the book, whether it found them at the right moment, or whether it did what I hoped it would do. A direct shop is smaller, but it’s mine. I can know who’s reading. I can put the book directly in the hands of someone who’s looking for it, rather than hoping an algorithm decides to show it to them. And a purchase made there supports the work in a more direct, more personal way than it ever could buried in a marketplace of millions of other titles.

    This isn’t a stunt, and it isn’t about volume. As I write in all of my books, my measure of success has never been sales numbers—it’s the right book reaching the right person, and that person passing it on. If Amal’s story is one you’ve already read, or one you’ve been meaning to start, I’d be grateful if you found it through the new shop. It’s a small thing, but it’s one more way to know this work is reaching someone who wanted it.

    The voyage is just beginning. Thank you for coming along.

    Cover montage of the Novels and Novelettes in the Halls of the Shadow King Series
  • The Time Has Come for King Arthur to Return the Sword

    The Time Has Come for King Arthur to Return the Sword

    Arthur Pendragon hasn’t drawn Excalibur in eleven years. He’s fifty-six, tired, and finished pretending the sword still belongs to him. So he loads it on a donkey and rides alone into the mountains of Snowdonia to return the sword to the water.

    He doesn’t expect anyone to be waiting for him there.

    It’s a quiet story about a king at the end of his legend — and what he finds out about his life when he gets there. Set in the world of The Halls of the Shadow King, for readers who like their Arthurian fiction grounded and a little unexpected.

    Only $2.99 on Kindle right now.

  • Western Literature with a Magical Realism Twist

    Western Literature with a Magical Realism Twist

    Nora Callahan can feel trouble before it has a name.

    She calls it reading weather—a sense, inherited from a grandmother she barely knew, that warns her when a man has already decided something terrible and just hasn’t done it yet. It saved her life once, in a trading post in New Mexico, when she walked out the back door for no reason she could explain. It’s saved her more times since.

    But Nora didn’t come west to be anyone’s oracle. She came to build a life after her husband’s death, on a parcel of land between two families who don’t know yet that they’re about to tear each other apart—and a man riding into the valley who gives off no weather at all. No pressure, no warning, nothing she can read. Just a blank where a person should be.

    Now everyone she’s come to love is standing in the path of something she can feel coming and can’t stop, can’t name, and may not be able to warn them about in time.

    THE RIM COUNTRY, Book One. Western Literature with a Magical Realism Twist.

    Other Links of Interest

    BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman

    POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman

    BUY The Rim Country: Book One “The Invitation” by W. Tod Newman.

  • The Questions “The Rim Country” Asks

    The Questions “The Rim Country” Asks

    The Rim Country isn’t really about the 1880s. It’s about a question that hasn’t gotten any easier to answer: what do you do with the people you love when you can see them heading toward something irreversible, and you can’t honestly tell them they’re wrong to go?

    The novel sits inside ideas that feel less like history and more like a mirror—the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, and why people confuse them; how revenge dresses itself up as justice when accountability is absent; and how two communities stalemated in a grudge war are often the last to notice they’re being played by ambitious outsiders.

    Nora Callahan, the woman caught in the middle of it, doesn’t get to stay above the fray and dispense wisdom. She has to live inside the not-knowing, the same way we all do when the people around us make devastating but somewhat defensible choices we can’t stop.

    Other Links of Interest

    BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman

    POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman

    BUY The Rim Country: Book One “The Invitation” by W. Tod Newman.