So last year – while recovering from an illness – I thought I’d do some reviewing again and signed up for some books from the BSFA Review editors. Well, I got some books and I wrote some reviews and I sent them in to the editors but for some reason none of them got printed (I suspect there were organisational issues, but it might just be that they didn’t like them – anyway, I never heard anything back). They’ve been sitting on my hard drive for a while and so I thought it’d stick them up on the old, slightly decrepit blog (something else I need to sort out). Here’s the first, I’ll get the rest up in a bit…

“There was toothwort along Allenton Road, and Dutchman’s breeches, bloodroot, and trillium back in the wet low places. Spring was taking hold.” (318)

It is not, in any sense, to damn this book with faint praise when I say that my favourite character in Frederic S Durbin’s The Country Under Heaven is the American countryside. The clue, after all, is right there in the name that this novel is – at least in part – a hymn to the American landscape. Set in a post-Civil War world of cowboys, gunfighters and monstrous evils, Ovid (the protagonist) and his faithful mount Jack, travel through a series of interlocking short stories. Sometimes they edge past familiar moments from history but, having survived a brush with death and bringing something terrifying back with him, Ovid is pursuing a series of visions that lead him to various supernatural threats. There are shootouts with bad guys and there are monsters to be overcome but there’s always time to stop “in the light of some red cedar and fir along a creek… beside a patch of white trapper’s tea. There was yellow tansy along the water, too. A chunky longspur was out pecking in the tussocks.” (200) Who wouldn’t want to ride through in this world?

Like science fiction, the western is a literature born in pulp magazines, and you can make an argument that both achieve their purest form in the short story. The Country Under Heaven is a novel – Durbin’s story has continuity and thematic consistency – but it is presented as a series of more-or-less discrete short stories and this form successfully and effectively wraps itself in the genre’s most convincing trappings.

The book’s blurb references western giant Louis L’Amour and the horror of HP Lovecraft. The debt to both is obvious. L’Amour shares Durbin’s interest in nature and the deep history of the American landscape (several times I was reminded in particular of L’Amour stories such as ‘Trap of Gold’ and ‘The Lonesome Gods’) but L’Amour’s characters often have a sharper edge to them. L’Amour’s protagonists are often complicit in their fates because something in their nature – pride, greed, youthful foolishness – leads them to their moments of crisis. They may share a landscape but L’Amour’s characters often have human failures that Durbin’s Ovid manifestly lacks because, it seems to me, Durbin has specifically chosen to reject this approach as a narrative device. Similarly, while Durbin’s horrors are of a type familiar from Lovecraft – deep, ancient and ineffable – unlike Lovecraft, Durbin is neither seduced by evil nor willing to concede its irresistible power. If much of the unsettling impact of Lovecraft’s horror rests on the overwhelming vastness of the monsters to be faced and futility of human resistance then Durbin refuses to replicate this sense of helplessness. There is always room for hope in Durbin’s stories, always the belief that the light is capable of casting out the dark and that, in particular, that Ovid’s faith is an impenetrable armour against evil’s temptations. There is a cost to be paid for this choice though, because often Durbin’s stories lack some of the tension and immediacy of emotion that is the trademark of more visceral horror.

There are places where Durbin’s story stumbles. There’s a strange moment at the end of ‘The Sound of Bells’ where the story suddenly jumps away from Ovid’s point of view and a final gunfight is presented as an excerpt from a modern history text. The result is jarring. I could not work out what purpose this choice was meant to serve. Its effect was to throw me right out of the book and Ovid’s world. It’s a strange and uncomfortable misstep.

There are other issues. Ovid’s relentless niceness sucks some of the tension out of the stories. Durbin is a writer of faith and Ovid’s goodness is obviously a choice by the author, reflecting a desire to present a liberal Christian sensibility in which kindness is the ultimate virtue. Not all protagonists need to be flawed but Ovid is in danger of becoming a cipher, overwhelmed by the characters he meets and the countryside he passes through. Even the great biblical characters have their moments of doubt and weakness and Ovid might have had felt more human if he had been a little less unwavering in his decency and a little more uncertain about the strangenesses he encounters.

Again, there’s a risk of sounding dismissive of The Country Under Heaven if I describe its horror as “cosy”, but I do not mean this as an insult. Durbin has made a deliberate decision to create a world where evil can be overcome by the good (or the Godly) and there’s never any sense that Ovid might be overwhelmed or outmatched by the monsters he faces. Since much modern horror relies on glamourizing the monsters or in valorising brutality it may seem an unlikely genre in which to look for a message about the values of decency, kindness and consistency but, in its own way, this makes the triumph of Ovid’s (and Durbin’s) faith even more notable.

If some of the choices and a few of its flaws mean that the book doesn’t quite become more than the sum of its parts, it doesn’t undermine what is a fundamentally enjoyable experience, because The Country Under Heaven is constructed from some very fine parts. I really liked the ghostly revenge of the first story (‘The Fresh Air Above’) and the race against monsters and tornados in the fourth (‘Wind’) but the most affecting of all is ‘The Olive Tree’ – a story about an apparently decent man who, through grief and weakness, does something truly horrible. And, through it all, the moments were the stories paused to indulge in the natural beauty of their world were constant nuggets of delight. If I’ve moaned about Ovid being a bit too nice, I should also say that I liked reading a horror novel that doesn’t want to revel in human misery but that provides a steady light in the dark.

The Country Under Heaven by Frederic S Durbin
(Melville House, 2025)