Evening's Empire
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
David Herter's first novel, Ceres Storm, was recently published to widespread acclaim. "Distinctive and imaginative, Herter's tale moves to its own disconcerting logic: a debut of immense promise," said Kirkus Reviews. Now Herter moves from SF to contemporary fantasy and to a more literary mode of storytelling.
Evening's Empire is set on the Oregon coast, in Evening, a small town famous for its cheeses. Russell Kent, an opera composer from Massachusetts, lost his beloved wife there a year ago to a freak accident, and returns now to confront his ghosts.
Kent has been commissioned to write an opera based upon Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, whose story fills his dreams, and only in Evening does he feel himself able to return to work. There he also discovers many strange things (even beyond the cheese sculptures), finds new love and new friendship, and is initiated into a fantastic secret the whole populace is hiding in a cavern beneath the town.
In some ways reminiscent of the Newford stories of Charles de Lint, this is an ambitious fantasy by an important new talent from the Pacific Northwest.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This contemporary riff on Jules Verne, a departure from Herter's well-received SF debut, Ceres Storm (2000), exhibits the same fine storytelling but, sorry to say, closes on a false note. A few years after his wife fell to her death from a cliff in Empire, Ore., Russell Kent returns to the quiet coastal village to compose an opera about Verne's Captain Nemo. Dreams of his dead wife soon trouble Russell's sleep, as do dreams of the town itself strangely altered. He begins an affair with his alluring landlady and gets acquainted with the locals, all the time sensing that everyone in Empire shares a secret. People who otherwise might seem merely eccentric, or behavior that might just be amusing, such as the town's general obsession with the varieties of cheese produced there, become more and more uncanny. The author does an excellent job of presenting everyday events in a slightly odd light. Russell gradually catches on that the folks of Empire believe that they're on the verge of literally unearthing something wonderful. Herter cranks up the suspense, amid increasingly bizarre but still vivid and convincing characters and settings. Unfortunately, the plot unravels in its last pages in a snarl of unexplained revelations and rushed action. While the novel's promotional copy compares it with Gene Wolfe's Peace and Charles de Lint's Newford stories, the cop-out ending is not one either of those pros would have chosen. But all the good writing that goes before suggests that Herter should gain the necessary mastery of his craft in due course.
