This Here Is Devil's Work
A Novel
by Curtis Bradley Vickers
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Pub Date Feb 23 2021 | Archive Date Feb 19 2021
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Description
A twelve-year veteran of the fireline, Morgan believes he knows what his teenage half-brother (Jeremy) needs to do to shrug off boyhood: spend a single season fighting forest fires to earn money for auto mechanic school. But when Jeremy joins the Ruby Mountain Hotshots and earns the respect and admiration of their fire boss (Bailey), Morgan must battle his own demons before they destroy him.
Meanwhile, life hasn’t been easy on Jacklynn—she longs to escape the small town in Montana where she has lived her whole life and reunite with her daughter and grandson in Tucson. Jacklynn wants to make up for a lifetime of missteps by protecting the boy and making sure her daughter stays on course. On the same day that an attractive stranger waltzes into her life, an opportunity for life-changing money presents itself in the form of a dozen pregnant heifers. The only trouble is, they aren’t hers—not yet, anyway.
Morgan and Jacklynn’s paths cross when lightning ignites a blaze in the untamed Montana wilderness, and their choices force each other into
the fury.
Set against the backdrop of wildfires raging across the West and the firefighters who continue to put their lives on the line, This Here Is Devil’s Work explores how love and loneliness can sour, and how they can eventually lead to desperate and self-destructive acts even for those people we consider heroic.
Advance Praise
“This Here is Devil’s Work is a vivid and evocative reminder that, here in the vastness of the American West, our personal stories and the stories of the land remain intertwined and inseparable.” —Michael P. Branch, author of Rants from the Hill and How to Cuss in Western
"In Curtis Vickers’s This Here is Devil’s Work the dreams of its characters burn as bright—and as devastatingly— as the fires of American West." —Allison Davis, author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk
“Tautly crafted and breathtakingly suspenseful, this debut novel
will leave you forever changed.” —Christopher Coake, author of You Would Have Told Me Not To
“In Curtis Vickers’ This Here is Devil’s Work, the archetypes of the American
West gets a much-needed update. The twining storylines of a grandmother turned- cattle rustler and a bitter wildland firefighter capture with frightening clarity and empathy what desperation will drive people to. This is the West that I know; full of dangerous lands and dangerous loves, where characters are either forged or consumed in the flames of a raging wildfire.” —Gabriel Urza, author of The White Death: An Illusion and All That Followed
“This Here Is Devil’s Work echoes the images of wildfires seen on the nightly news. This timely novel explores the subject matter and themes of stewardship and control, and many readers will be impacted by the difficult contradictions exposed within these pages.” —Markus Egeler Jones, author of How the Butcher Bird Finds Her Voice
“Curtis Vickers forges unflinchingly into the fiery hearts of his characters and shelters us from the showering sparks produced by their conflagrations. Montana and its people have rarely burned as brightly as they do in this vivid, finely crafted, page-turner of a novel.” —Siân Griffiths, author of Scrapple, Borrowed Horses, and The Heart Keeps Faulty Time
Marketing Plan
Marketing Campaign:
• Pre-publication promotion, including
national print and digital
advertising, reviewer outreach
and Edelweiss and NetGalley
promotion
• National print advertising
• Online advertising campaign
• National publicity outreach
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Author website:
curtisbradleyvickers.com
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781647790042 |
| PRICE | $28.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 320 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Se O, Reviewer
The first word that comes to mind when thinking about this novel from Curtis Bradley Vickers is 'evocative.' It's evocative of a place, of people, of an experience - a raging wildfire - that I hope I never have. The characters are very well drawn and the writing makes them very believable.
There are several storylines at play throughout the course of the book and this was initially a little confusing but then becomes mesmerizing as you see them begin to converge.
This is not a happy story but it's not depressing - it felt real in terms of the lives some people choose to live or are forced by circumstance or societal expectations to live.
The novel feels very timely given the number of wildfires we've seen emerge in the American west but it's actually timeless since the battle against fire probably hasn't changed much in decades or is unlikely to change much in the future. Neither will the emotions nor the lives of the characters involved.
This novel brought to mind the spare and despairing atmosphere I found and enjoyed, it should be emphasized, in David Vann's 'Goat Mountain,' 'The Hearts of Men' by Nickolas Butler, or 'A Catalog of Birds' by Laura Harrington, where the characters are prisoners of fate, family, love, and the landscape itself.
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