"Jordan Peele's Nope meets True Grit in Nicholas Belardes’s Ten Sleep, a supernatural modern-day western about a trio of young people on a 10-day cattle drive that leads them through a canyon haunted by ancient mysteries and savage beasts who existed long before humankind.
A young Mexican American woman detects uncanny creatures stalking her on a cattle drive toward a canyon soaked in blood in an unforgettable novel, brilliantly infusing the modern Western with spine-chilling horror …
When Greta Molina’s old friend Tiller offered her the job, a ten-day cattle drive across the Wyoming prairie from the ranching town of Ten Sleep, it sounded like a well-paid break. Three hundred and twenty cows and calves, two guys her age she’s known since college, and a few long days on an ATV will give her time to sort out the mess in her head. The canyon along the trail has a history, sure, but nature has a tendency toward violence. Greta can accept that, even if it makes her insides squirm.
What Greta doesn’t know is the legacy of murder and rot that runs deep into the rocks of this land. As each night passes on the prairie, the trio faces mounting supernatural dangers: a ghost train of the damned, wild animals walking alongside dead ones—and evidence of a gigantic creature in the skies, one that’s supposedly been extinct for eons. And Tiller may be hiding even darker secrets the further they go. Safety is only ten sleeps away, but Greta soon realizes that may be too long for all of them to survive.
Nicholas Belardes’s Ten Sleep is a fresh portrayal of the American West for fans of Catriona Ward, Victor LaValle and Jordan Peele’s Nope, by a rising star in horror."
"Unnatural horrors and a town in peril: Stephen King’s Under the Dome meets
The Last of Us in this harrowing climate fiction novel.
When a hidden evil emerges from the depths of the ocean, the tight-knit town of
Baywood is caught in a climate disaster of mysterious origins: an unusual wave of
sea snails enter the estuary and transform wildlife, seascapes, and finally, people.
Once infected, residents start “deading”: collapsing and dying, only to resurrect,
changed in ways both physical and fundamental. After the government isolates
Baywood, paranoia and surveillance run rampant. A newly formed cult called the
Risers starts targeting those who are not deading: the introverted bird-loving Blas,
his jaded older brother, Chango, the widow Kumi, and her cautious neighbor,
Ingram. The survivors of Baywood eventually must choose to escape, to
investigate the deading’s origins, or to become subsumed by this terrifying new
normal.
At points claustrophobic and haunting, soulful and melancholic, The Deading
lyrically explores the disintegration of society, the horror of survival and
adaptation, and the unexpected solace found through connections in nature and
between humans."
