The Country Under Heaven by Frederic S. Durbin Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction, literary fiction, Weird West, Western
Pages: 331
Published by Melville House on May 13, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Louis L’Amour meets H.P. Lovecraft in this thrilling western epic about a former Civil War soldier wracked by enigmatic visions . . .
Set in the 1880s, the story follows Ovid Vesper, a former Union soldier who has been having enigmatic visions after surviving one of the Civil War’s most gruesome battles, the Battle of Antietam. As he travels across the country following those visions, he finds himself in stranger and increasingly more dangerous encounters with other worlds hidden in the spaces of his own mind, not to mention the dangers of the Wild West.
Ovid brings his steady calm and compassion as he helps the people of a broken country, rapidly changing but, like himself, still reeling and wounded from the war. He assists with matters of all sorts, from odd jobs around the house, to guiding children back to their own universe, to hunting down unnatural creatures that stalk the night — all the while seeking his own personal resolution and peace from his visions.
Ovid’s epic journey across the American West with a surprising cast of characters blends elements of the classic Western with historical fantasy in a way like no other.
My Review:
Ovid Vesper had not only ‘seen the elephant’ as a Union soldier, but after being severely wounded at the Battle of Antietam, that elephant – or at least one of its avatars – followed him home.
And continued following him around for nearly two decades, giving him strange visions, the ability to find hidden things and liminal places between worlds, and generally giving him the ability to see both utterly weird and completely mundane brushes with death before they happened. So he could stop them from happening. Sometimes. Sorta/kinda.
Because we’re seeing Vesper’s ‘Weird West’ from inside of his own head, we’re never one hundred percent sure whether it’s literally all in his head – and just in his head – or whether there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy but that he’s able to see them – and for them to see him.
We travel with Vesper as he rides on his faithful and rather intelligent horse Jack, back and forth across the West from 1880 to 1889. It’s a world that’s changing rapidly, as the war is over, the peace sometimes still seems precarious, the west is still wild but the railroads are settling it down – whether it wants that or not.
But it’s a big place and there are still plenty of spaces where the weird runs free, and Vesper is right smack in the middle of all of it, from one of the last cattle drives to chasing down gangs like the Daltons to turning the tide of a classic shootout to the side of the ‘white hats’ and helping to leave the ‘black hats’ in the dust.
And along the way that ‘elephant’ – the monster he calls the ‘Craither’ – chases him from pillar to post, occasionally helping but mostly haunting him, herding him towards a resolution that neither of them can quite see until they get there.
But in Vesper’s slow, steady meander through the wide-open spaces of ‘the country under heaven’ we get to experience the world he knew, one that may or may not have ever been as either the dime-novels or TV and Western-themed movies ever portrayed it, but was weird and wild and beautiful in its own way – and is now as gone as that Craither.
Escape Rating A-: I waxed philosophical there for a bit, which fits perfectly with this book because Ovid Vesper certainly does too. He tells his story in a series of vignettes that outline his decade of wandering in pursuit of his visions. The stories do all feel of a piece in the end, as friends and neighbors and enemies come into – and fall out of – the narrative, only to return again later having moved along just as Vesper himself does. But it doesn’t completely gel into a novel exactly, more like a collection of interconnected stories.
But the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and while it doesn’t quite become a novel it does come to a satisfying – and surprising – overall conclusion.
This book sits at a fascinating conjunction of genres, perched on the fencepost between Western historical fiction, Weird West fantasy, outright horror and literary fiction. Normally fence-sitting is uncomfortable due to a proliferation of splinters in the ass, and the fencepost – well, let’s not envision that too closely.
But it works here, in fact, it works better than I thought it would, and that’s all due to Ovid Vesper’s first-person voice. He is more than a bit philosophical, he’s accepting of the world as he sees it because he’s aware that he’s a bit weird and so accepts whatever weird anyone else has going on, he takes care of his friends, he protects himself and his own, and he talks to his horse who really does seem to be listening.
I didn’t so much feel like I was reading as that I was following along in Vesper’s wake on another horse, just listening in on his thoughts and hopes and dreams and especially his experiences.
In spite of the occasional shootout and/or mad dash to safety, this isn’t a story with a lot of high highs or nail-biter chapters. It kind of goes along at the pace of Vesper’s horse Jack, being a part of the moment and the journey in full, enjoying the ride and the view but always moving towards a distant horizon.
I always adore stories that provide moving descriptions of times and places that are gone, especially when the descriptions are vivid and the characters are fascinating – which Vesper certainly does, and is. In the end, The Country Under Heaven turned out to be the right book at the right time for this reader, and I’m happy I took the time to travel along with Vesper and Jack – and even his Craither.
