Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

The year is 1911. In Cold Spring Harbour, New York, the newly formed Eugenics Records Office is sending its agents to catalogue the infirm, the insane, and the criminal - with an eye to a cull, for the betterment of all. Near Cracked Wheel, Montana, a terrible illness leaves Jason Thistledown an orphan, stranded in his dead mother's cabin until the spring thaw shows him the true meaning of devastation - and the barest thread of hope. At the edge of the utopian mill town of Eliada, Idaho, Doctor Andrew Waggoner faces a Klansman's noose and glimpses wonder in the twisting face of the patient known only as Mister Juke.

And deep in a mountain lake overlooking that town, something stirs, and thinks, in its way: Things are looking up.

Eutopia follows Jason and Andrew as together and alone, they delve into the secrets of Eliada - industrialist Garrison Harper's attempt to incubate a perfect community on the edge of the dark woods and mountains of northern Idaho. What they find reveals the true, terrible cost of perfection - the cruelty of the surgeon's knife - the folly of the cull - and a monstrous pact with beings that use perfection as a weapon, and faith as a trap.

"Nickle's debut novel Eutopia - an entrancing amalgam of historical thriller, dark fantasy and weird fiction - is an utterly creepy, bladder-loosening, storytelling tour de force." --Paul Goat Allen, BarnesandNoble.com

"Nickle (Monstrous Affections) blends Little House on the Prairie with distillates of Rosemary's Baby and The X-Files to create a chilling survival-of-the-fittest story. . . . [His] bleak debut novel mixes utopian vision, rustic Americana, and pure creepiness." --Publishers Weekly
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"Eutopia is as frightening in its social message as it is with its religious themes, and features irresistable prose... A top-notch novel all around." -Nick Cato, The Horror Fiction Review

"Eutopia crosses genres in a world where folks from a rustic Faulkner novel might clash with H.P. Lovecraft's monstrosities. Add a dash of Cronenbergian body horror to atmosphere worthy of Poe, and you get one of the most original horror stories in years." -Chris Hallock, All Things Horror

"David Nickle has reincarnated Lovecraft and spun a new direction for the terror that is to follow. This is certainly not the last we will have heard from this talented new face in horror." -Chris Hall, (DLS Reviews)

I'm not the best judge of horror, but I've read Lovecraft, Poe, King, and good writing is good writing. Good writing carries over to a book regardless of genre. And there's plenty of good writing in David Nickle's Eutopia.
-Jim Cherry, Sonar4 Landing Dock

"A writer to watch." --Publishers Weekly

"Bourbon-rough, poetic, and vivid." --Cory Doctorow

"...A worthy heir to the mantle of Stephen King. And I don't mean the King of Under the Dome... but the master of psychological suspense who ruled the '80s with classics like Pet Sematary." --Alex Gonto, The National Post

"David Nickle has reincarnated Lovecraft and spun a new direction for the terror that is to follow. This is certainly not the last we will have heard from this talented new face in horror." --Chris Hall, DLS Reviews