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An American Western Thriller
by Rae DelBianco
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.
"Starred Review. Furious and electric ...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." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. This take-no-prisoners debut from DelBianco has been compared to Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Ron Rash, Donald Ray Pollock, and Jim Thompson, and rather than argue, we'll just throw in Gabriel Tallent. Against a backdrop of ferocious, visceral, almost psychedelically intense nature writing... Man, this 'redneck kid author' can write." - Kirkus Reviews
"In this high-octane, take-no-prisoners debut, Rae DelBianco portrays the mayhem and grit of the new West with the demon eye of Cormac McCarthy but a fierce heart very much her own. I dare you to draw a breath from beginning to end." - Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of A House Among the Trees and Three Junes
"Written ... so provocatively and viscerally." - Nylon, 46 Great Books to Read This Summer"
"A brilliant, incandescent debut that will remind everyone of a young Cormac McCarthy." - Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Son
"Rough Animals is the kind of novel that can teach you the mechanics of dissecting a bull with only an axe and a knife, or how to survive on a coyote's blood if you're waterless in the desert. It renders its portrait of brother-sister love and their pitiless world of the badlands of northern Utah with some of Denis Johnson's flamboyant lyricism, when it comes to longings for transcendence, and with more than a little of Cormac McCarthy's implacable vision of a world in which we survive by doing the thing most others could not bring themselves to do." - Jim Shepard, Story Prize winner and author of The World to Come and Like You'd Understand, Anyway
"A wild and alive debut, full of grit, gunfire, blood, and bad news. Rough Animals is as phantasmagoric as McCarthy and as pitiless as Jim Thompson. A rare treat." - Joshua Ferris, bestselling author of The Dinner Party and Then We Came to an End
"DelBianco's captivating debut, Rough Animals, stakes its claim to the modern Western, substituting assault weapons for six-shooters and cartel members for the old-fashioned gunslingers in a story told with a style of classic American grit." - Douglas Brunt, New York Times bestselling author of Ghosts of Manhattan and The Means
This information about Rough Animals was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rae DelBianco grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where she began competitively showing livestock at the age of eight and founded a beef cattle operation at fourteen. She attended Duke University as a Robertson Scholar, and is an alumnus of Tin House's Summer Workshop and Curtis Brown's Novel-Writing Course in London. She lives outside New York City.
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