Rough Animals
An American Western Thriller
by Rae DelBianco
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Pub Date Jun 05 2018 | Archive Date Jun 05 2018
Skyhorse Publishing | Arcade Publishing
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Description
Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2018 —Southern Living
46 Great Books to Read This Summer—Nylon
Dazzling Debuts"—WYPR, "The Weekly Reader"
8 New Books You Should Read This June—vulture.com
Summer Thrillers That Will Have You at the Edge of Your Chaise Lounge—Refinery29
What We Read, Watched, and Listened to in May—Outside
“Furious and electric . . . a fever dream."—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review!*
Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men... Ever since their father's untimely death five years before, Wyatt Smith and his inseparably close twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on their family's isolated ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when, just after spotting one of their steers lying dead in the field, Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes four more cattle with it. The shooter: a fever-eyed, fearsome girl-child with a TEC-9 in her left hand and a worn shotgun in her right. They hold the girl captive, but she breaks loose overnight and heads south into the desert. With the dawning realization that the loss of cattle will mean the certain loss of the ranch, Wyatt feels he has no choice but to go after her and somehow find restitution for what's been lost.
Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic twelve-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld he only half understands; a world that pitches him not only against the primordial ways of men and the beautiful yet brutally unforgiving landscape, but also against himself. As he winds his way down from the mountains of Box Elder to the mesas of Monument Valley and back, Wyatt is forced to look for the first time at who he is and what he’s capable of, and how those hard truths set him irrevocably apart from the one person he’s ever really known and loved. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, and gripping from the first gunshot to the last, Rough Animals is a tour de force from a powerful new voice.
Advance Praise
"In this high-octane, take-no-prisoners debut, Rae DelBianco portrays the mayhem and grit of the new West with the demon eye of Cormac McCarthy but a fierce heart very much her own. I dare you to draw a breath from beginning to end." —Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of A House Among the Trees and Three Junes
"Rough Animals is the kind of novel that can teach you the mechanics of dissecting a bull with only an axe and a knife, or how to survive on a coyote’s blood if you’re waterless in the desert. It renders its portrait of brother-sister love and their pitiless world of the badlands of northern Utah with some of Denis Johnson’s flamboyant lyricism, when it comes to longings for transcendence, and with more than a little of Cormac McCarthy’s implacable vision of a world in which we survive by doing the thing most others could not bring themselves to do." —Jim Shepard, Story Prize winner and author of The World to Come and Like You'd Understand, Anyway
Marketing Plan
- For readers of Ron Rash and Donald Ray Pollock as well as The Cartel, a debut modern literary Western where Breaking Badmeets No Country for Old Men.
- A visceral and violent story that takes place on the remotest edges of rural Utah and shows what happens when the desperation of survival becomes the only thing on your mind.
- Powerful characters including a 14-year-old girl who is a violent and unhesitant killer.
- With equal parts brutality and lyricism, a powerful debut from a new master of the modern American Western.
- Author is developing her platform (10,000 Instagram followers) and has connections from the six-month Curtis Brown UK novel course and attended the 2017 Tin House writers' workshop.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781628729733 |
| PRICE | $24.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 304 |
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