In the Valley of the Sun

Starred review from May 1, 2017
In this bold, confident debut, Davidson takes the vampire myth to 1980s West Texas, perfectly capturing the feel of the era and place. Travis Stillwell is hardly a good man; he’s strangled multiple women with his belt. But when a vampire named Rue turns him and strands him in a motel parking lot, he resists killing the model’s widowed owner, Annabelle, or her young son, Sandy. This frustrates Rue, who has wandered for decades before finding someone as violent as Travis and needs him to embrace his inner beast. Meanwhile, a Texas Ranger named Reader is hunting Travis down, unaware of the change he’s undergone. Davidson lets his story play out slowly, using multiple points of view and long flashbacks to explore the perspectives and histories of his various protagonists. The obligatory violence becomes an organic, inevitable result of the needs of the characters coming into conflict. Davidson successfully makes the lines between genre and literary fiction bleed together in a complex novel of horror, human nature, and the American South. Agent: Elizabeth Copps, Maria Carvainis Agency.

Starred review from May 1, 2017
Rural Texas, 1980. Travis is not a good manhaunted by his violent past, he takes it out on the women he meets. One night, however, a girl leaves him bloodied and weak in his trailer, and he wakes with an inability to tolerate daylight and a strange and overpowering hunger. When a widow and her young son see the trailer in the parking lot of their roadside motel, they offer the sickly cowboy some work around the place. The three lonely souls strike up an awkward friendship, but not for long, because a veteran Texas Ranger is following a trail of dead girls that leads right up to Travis' doorstep. This is not your typical vampire novel, rather it is actually a lyrical modern western, with a large dose of suspense. Everyone has a secret, and no one is completely innocent. The story drips with atmosphere, and the plot and the characters will play with readers' minds. Hand this hauntingly dark, yet oddly beautiful debut to fans of literary psychological suspense who don't mind a touch of the supernatural, and especially target fans of the film Hell or High Water and the novels of Cormac McCarthy or Stephen Graham Jones. This is one that readers won't easily forget after turning the final page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)