One night in 1980, a man becomes a monster.

Haunted by his past, Travis Stillwell spends his nights searching out women in West Texas honky-tonks. What he does with them doesn’t make him proud, just quiets the demons for a little while. But after Travis crosses paths one night with a mysterious pale-skinned girl, he wakes weak and bloodied in his cabover camper the next morning—with no sign of a girl, no memory of the night before.

Annabelle Gaskin spies the camper parked behind her motel and offers the cowboy a few odd jobs to pay his board. Travis takes her up on the offer, if only to buy time, to lay low and heal. By day, he mends the old motel, insinuating himself into the lives of Annabelle and her ten-year-old son. By night, in the cave of his camper, he fights an unspeakable hunger. Before long, Annabelle and her boy come to realize that this strange cowboy is not what he seems.

Half a state away, a grizzled Texas Ranger is hunting Travis for his past misdeeds, but what he finds will lead him to a revelation far more monstrous. A man of the law, he’ll have to decide how far into the darkness he’ll go for the sake of justice.

When these lives converge on a dusty autumn night, an old evil will find new life—and new blood.

I just finished In the Valley of the Sun by Andy Davidson, not 30 minutes ago.

Fuck.

This book manages to be many things, all at once. It is unequivocally a horror novel, and a fucking disturbing one at that. Davidson’s prose is really quite beautiful, and somewhat stark. It really echoes the desolate feel of this book’s 1980 Texas setting…the vibe was like if Cormac McCarthy decided to write a vampire novel & also use quotation marks, but still…this is something totally unique.

This is the story of Travis Stillwell, one of the most troubled & troubling characters I think I’ve ever met. He’s…well, he’s a serial killer, to begin with. Drifting across Texas in a bit of a daze, meeting & strangling young women he meets in bars.

Then one night, he meets Rue, and his already-fucked-up existence gets even worse. He wakes up the next morning bloodied & completely out of sorts. There’s a hallucinatory quality to so much of this, and it can feel like you’re just as lost and confused as Travis is.

Soon after, Travis winds up parked near a semi-defunct motel/cafe owned by a woman named Annabelle. She & her young boy, Sandy, live on the property, and slowly & tentatively form a bit of a friendship with Travis. They know something is plaguing him, but they don’t know what. And neither does Travis, really.

While all this unfolds, Travis is also being pursued by a veteran Texas Ranger named Reader. These are some of the more straight-forward passages in the book, and also show that Andy Davidson could write the fuck out of a crime novel! And Reader would be a compelling enough character to carry a full novel…love him!!

There’s moments in this book that are simply heartbreaking, especially as we learn more & more about Travis’s deeply traumatic past. And as the reader, you’re left to juggle the fact that Travis is a monster, (both figuratively and then literally) and yet some of his interactions with Annabelle & Sandy are almost…sweet? At the very least, Davidson makes the character more sympathetic than maybe feels comfortable.

In the Valley of the Sun shook me up, for real. There were some unspeakably horrific moments here, but more than that, this is such a dark look at the human condition. It can feel incredibly bleak at times, but there’s also something quite beautiful about this book as well.

Big thanks to Skyhorse Publishing for sending me a copy!! This paperback edition releases today, March 5th!!