Travis Stillwell spends his nights searching out women in West Texashonky-tonks. What he does with them doesn't make him proud, just quiets the demons for a little while. But his nights soon take a terrifying turn in a desert cantina, where Travis crosses paths with a mysterious pale-skinned girlin red boots. Come the morning, he wakes weak and bloodied in his cabover camper, no sign of a girl, and no memory of the night before.
Annabelle Gaskin spies the camper parked behind her rundown motel and offers the dishevelled cowboy inside a few odd jobs to pay his board. Travis takes her up on the offer, if only to buy time, to lay low, to 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 they've taken in is not what he seems.
Half a state away, a grizzled Texas ranger is hunting Travis down forhis past misdeeds, but what he finds will lead him to a revelation far more monstrous than he could ever imagine. 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 willfind new life-and new blood.
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[He sat for awhile in the close, quiet dark of the bedroom, black straw Bullhide in his lap]***
(Contraband, 13 October 2017, paperback, 288 pages, borrowed from my library)
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This is myfirst time reading the author. I really enjoyed this book, sort of a Cormac McCarthy crossed with Joe Hill. This is a book about a man, a cowboy and a wastrel by all accounts who becomes a vampire. What I liked is the fact theauthor never really says Travis is a vampire. The reader is given enough information to draw their own conclusions but is never explicitly told whatTravis is. I'm not overly fond of Westerns but In the Valley of the Sun isan exception. The book is quite dark and bloody at times but sheer pleasure toread. I liked the fact Travis is not an innocent seduced and turned into a vampire. He is a human monster turned into a different kind of monster. Nice touch. In the Valley of the Sun is well-written and I had a great timewith it.
