{"id":3147,"date":"2026-05-26T17:26:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T16:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=3147"},"modified":"2026-05-26T17:26:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T16:26:54","slug":"review-the-country-under-heaven-by-frederic-s-durbin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=3147","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: The Country Under Heaven by Frederic S Durbin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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…<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere was toothwort along Allenton Road, and Dutchman\u2019s breeches, bloodroot, and trillium back in the wet low places. Spring was taking hold.\u201d (318) <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is not, in any sense, to damn this book with faint praise when I say that my favourite character in Frederic S Durbin\u2019s The Country Under Heaven<\/em> is the American countryside. The clue, after all, is right there in the name that this novel is \u2013 at least in part \u2013 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\u2019s always time to stop \u201cin the light of some red cedar and fir along a creek\u2026 beside a patch of white trapper\u2019s tea. There was yellow tansy along the water, too. A chunky longspur was out pecking in the tussocks.\u201d (200) Who wouldn\u2019t want to ride through in this world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> is a novel \u2013 Durbin\u2019s story has continuity and thematic consistency \u2013 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\u2019s most convincing trappings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book\u2019s blurb references western giant Louis L\u2019Amour and the horror of HP Lovecraft. The debt to both is obvious. L\u2019Amour shares Durbin\u2019s interest in nature and the deep history of the American landscape (several times I was reminded in particular of L\u2019Amour stories such as \u2018Trap of Gold\u2019 and \u2018The Lonesome Gods\u2019) but L\u2019Amour\u2019s characters often have a sharper edge to them. L\u2019Amour\u2019s protagonists are often complicit in their fates because something in their nature \u2013 pride, greed, youthful foolishness \u2013 leads them to their moments of crisis. They may share a landscape but L\u2019Amour\u2019s 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\u2019s horrors are of a type familiar from Lovecraft \u2013 deep, ancient and ineffable \u2013 unlike Lovecraft, Durbin is neither seduced by evil nor willing to concede its irresistible power. If much of the unsettling impact of Lovecraft\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s stories lack some of the tension and immediacy of emotion that is the trademark of more visceral horror.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are places where Durbin\u2019s story stumbles. There\u2019s a strange moment at the end of \u2018The Sound of Bells\u2019 where the story suddenly jumps away from Ovid\u2019s 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\u2019s world. It\u2019s a strange and uncomfortable misstep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are other issues. Ovid’s relentless niceness <\/em>sucks some of the tension out of the stories. Durbin is a writer of faith and Ovid\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, there\u2019s a risk of sounding dismissive of The Country Under Heaven<\/em> if I describe its horror as \u201ccosy\u201d, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s (and Durbin\u2019s) faith even more notable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If some of the choices and a few of its flaws mean that the book doesn\u2019t quite become more than the sum of its parts, it doesn\u2019t undermine what is a fundamentally enjoyable experience, because The Country Under Heaven<\/em> is constructed from some very fine parts. I really liked the ghostly revenge of the first story (\u2018The Fresh Air Above\u2019) and the race against monsters and tornados in the fourth (\u2018Wind\u2019) but the most affecting of all is \u2018The Olive Tree\u2019 \u2013 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\u2019ve moaned about Ovid being a bit too nice, I should also say that I liked reading a horror novel that doesn\u2019t want to revel in human misery but that provides a steady light in the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Country Under Heaven<\/em> by Frederic S Durbin<\/strong>
(Melville House, 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-OL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3148,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147\/revisions\/3148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}