The Country Under Heaven
Dizzying visions haunt the otherwise delicate beauty of Frederic S. Durbin’s supernatural novel The Country Under Heaven.
Since surviving the Battle of Antietam, Ovid experiences the intrusion of premonitory shimmers. As he migrates throughout the untamed West in the 1880s, he is tailed by a looming creature that arrives when his life is imperiled. Soon, a cavalcade of other eldritch beings intervene in his fortunes too. When it seems his luck is running out, the thin boundaries between the real and surreal begin to dissolve, leaving him to try to piece together anomalies from his world and beyond.
Ovid narrates, his voice vivid. He is a sympathetic hero with deep introspective reservoirs of observational wisdom that he summons in elegant, simple, and descriptive nineteenth-century language. His experiences are punctuated by his roundabout philosophies concerning the plight of his visitations and his rich, eloquent explorations of the country he’s traveling.
Enamored of the sprawling flora of the undiscovered territories of the West, Ovid articulates his musings about them and about the people he encounters like a cowboy poet. It’s here where the understated dynamics of the prose become unavoidable, even remarkable, as Ovid reconciles the horrors of his visions and what they’re driving at. The story, in turn, dovetails its symbiosis of Western drama and dark fantasy to moving effect.
A triumphant snapshot of the hellish fallout in the divided US after the Civil War, The Country Under Heaven makes note of the amorphous individual terrors that those involved in the war carried with them forever after. This is a cosmic Western novel that doubles as a psychological treatise on the hidden wonders of radiant and mysterious inner worlds.
Reviewed by
Ryan Prado
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