Beyond the Horizon

by Ryan Ireland

Overview

THE DEVIL IS ALWAYS IN DISGUISE

A stranger appears at an isolated cabin in frontier America. He has no friends, and no apparent purpose. But as the sun disappears and the desert darkens, a series of strange and savage events start to unfold.

Turning the western genre on its head, Ryan Ireland’s deeply affecting tale transports readers into a visceral and terrifying world of shape-shifters, shadows and the darkest parts of Western American lore.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780745992
Publisher:	Oneworld Publications
Publication date:	02/04/2016
Series:	Point Blank
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ryan Ireland was born and raised in Ohio. He lives in Alpha, Ohio, with his wife and three children. His writing has also been published in Fogdog Review, Seems and Writing on the Edge. In 2009, he was recognized by Glimmer Train as one of the 25 Best New Writers. Beyond the Horizon is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

‘With trenchant dialogue, affecting characters, and a page-turner of a story, Ryan Ireland has given readers a mysterious and exciting Western that may become a classic.’

Ron Hansen

‘An unflinching, soul-searching story about the dangers of the American West... Ireland’s voice stands apart and he will surely be marked as a courageous and essential writer.’

Ann Weisgarber

‘Expertly plotted, artfully executed, compulsively readable... a writer who has something to say.’

Los Angeles Review of Books

'Mythical, dangerous and deeply unsettling.'

Shortlist

Expertly plotted, artfully executed, compulsively readable, Ryan Ireland’s Beyond the Horizon offers more evidence that young writers are doing some of their most compelling work in the one-time ghetto of genre fiction, and it marks the debut of a writer with a command of the form, a writer who has something to say. Attempting to engage the mythology of the West as well as of the western itself, Ireland aims high, and thanks to no small amount of vision, talent, and audacity, his novel succeeds on nearly every level…. A page-turner and an adventure story — as well as the obligatory deconstruction of the genre — the novel evolves into a fantastical history of the American West.”
— Tom Andes in The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Blending narratives and playing with concepts of time, Ireland tells a brutal, twisted tale of an imagined, metaphorical American West that will remind readers of Blood Meridian author Cormac McCarthy.”
— Toldeo City Paper

“Ireland finds no heroes in his debut novel, which blends fanciful history with magic realism to create a critical allegory of the American expansionist experience.... Intellectual in theme, literary in execution: think Gabriel García Márquez reimagining Little Big Man. ”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Ryan Ireland has given readers a mysterious and exciting Western that may become a classic.”
— Ron Hansen, author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

“Ireland’s intensely and brutally violent debut novel sweeps through period and place while exploring the role memory plays in the establishment of creation myths."
— Library Journal

“ Beyond the Horizon is an unflinching, soul-searching story about the dangers of the American West. Through the use of lyrical and mythic prose, Ireland explores the darkest regions of desire, ambition, and survival. Ireland’s voice stands apart and he will surely be marked as a courageous and essential writer.”
— Ann Weisgarber, author of The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

From the Publisher

04/01/2015
On the vast plains of the American West, an unnamed man lives with a pregnant woman who is not his wife. A strange visitor encourages the gullible man to go to a faraway fort to register the woman and her child with the census. The man travels through rugged terrain on this fool's errand, only to be hunted and haunted throughout the novel by the stranger, who had killed the woman. The story of the two characters becomes a creation myth for the American West in which the stranger plays God, building and violently destroying civilizations. The pair move forward and backward in time in dreamlike snippets, encountering life on the plains before their births and catching glimpses of the future. VERDICT Ireland's intensely and brutally violent debut novel sweeps through period and place while exploring the role memory plays in the establishment of creation myths. Recommended only for readers of literary fiction who can stomach a barbaric vision of the West. [Regional tour.]—Emily Hamstra, Univ. of Michigan Libs., Ann Arbor

Library Journal

2015-02-02
Ireland finds no heroes in his debut novel, which blends fanciful history with magic realism to create a critical allegory of the American expansionist experience. Three primary characters roam the tale, all nameless, all symbolic rather than fully realized. One's a boy raised aboard various vessels by an illiterate sailor. Shipwrecked, father and son wash up somewhere on America's shores. The man's killed; the young man—freed of his father's dominance—heads west in a mule-drawn wagon. The man homesteads on the great western prairie, a place of welcome solitude. "He wondered how long it might be before this place he traversed became infected with people." A nomad band passes, leaving behind a pregnant young woman. She becomes a promise of something the man's never had—home, family. A mysterious stranger arrives and tells the man he must go register the family for a census. After the man sets off, the stranger kills the pregnant woman. As the man treks across the mountains, pursued by the stranger, all that transpires shifts and shuttles through time—from Anasazi settlements to shopping malls to the Dust Bowl and back to Custer and Jackson, Pizarro and Cortés. Amid cannibalism, genocide, slave labor and other horrors, allegories abound: the man as a seeker of idyllic pastoral life and the stranger as the ravenous industrial future; or the man as peaceful aboriginal people and the stranger as invading whites, who believe "the ancient formula of progress…needed casualties….Death is progress." Intellectual in theme, literary in execution: think Gabriel García Márquez reimagining Little Big Man.

Kirkus Reviews