Rough Animals
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3.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The 25 Best Thriller Books of the Summer—New York Post
Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2018 —Southern Living
46 Great Books to Read This Summer—Nylon
Dazzling Debuts"—WYPR, "The Weekly Reader"
Summer Thrillers That Will Have You at the Edge of Your Chaise Lounge—Refinery29
8 New Books You Should Read This June—vulture.com
What We Read, Watched, and Listened to in May—Outside
“Furious and electric . . . a fever dream."—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review!*
Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men... Ever since their father's untimely death five years before, Wyatt Smith and his inseparably close twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on their family's isolated ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when, just after spotting one of their steers lying dead in the field, Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes four more cattle with it. The shooter: a fever-eyed, fearsome girl-child with a TEC-9 in her left hand and a worn shotgun in her right. They hold the girl captive, but she breaks loose overnight and heads south into the desert. With the dawning realization that the loss of cattle will mean the certain loss of the ranch, Wyatt feels he has no choice but to go after her and somehow find restitution for what's been lost.
Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic twelve-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld he only half understands; a world that pitches him not only against the primordial ways of men and the beautiful yet brutally unforgiving landscape, but also against himself. As he winds his way down from the mountains of Box Elder to the mesas of Monument Valley and back, Wyatt is forced to look for the first time at who he is and what he’s capable of, and how those hard truths set him irrevocably apart from the one person he’s ever really known and loved. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, and gripping from the first gunshot to the last, Rough Animals is a tour de force from a powerful new voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In DelBianco's furious and electric debut, a contemporary western, Wyatt and Lucy Smith are twins living a hardscrabble existence on a cattle ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. Early one morning, Wyatt discovers that one of his steers has been fatally shot. The killer is a barely-teenaged girl, who, during a brief shoot-out, wounds Wyatt and kills three more of his cattle before escaping. Knowing the entire ranch enterprise has been economically doomed by the shooting, Wyatt decides to go after the girl, who is wounded herself, and demand restitution. With Lucy holding down the fort, Wyatt follows the girl south towards Salt Lake City, tracking her through an inhospitable desert of armed outlaw bikers, camouflaged meth labs, drug deals gone wrong, and hungry coyote packs. Interspersed with Wyatt's narrative are flashbacks to the twins being raised by their father, who schools them in the cruel lessons of nature. Although clearly influenced by the prose styles of Cormac McCarthy and the late Jim Harrison, DelBianco nevertheless develops her own distinct voice, alternately laconic and roughly poetic. And though the girl is more device than actual character, the novel succeeds as a viscerally evoked and sparely plotted fever dream, a bleakly realized odyssey through an American west populated by survivors and failed dreamers.
