The story behind the story
Strangely, the origins of my new novel The Country Under Heaven, a historical fantasy set in the American West of the 1880s, lie within a painting by V. Shane of an Amazon-style warrior woman and a black panther; the pair are deep within the emerald shadows of a forest—not at all a typical western scene. Jason Waltz of Rogue Blades Entertainment ran an anthology contest, inviting heroic stories for which the cover artwork could be an illustration. I have always loved studying both the mythos and the reality of the nineteenth-century West, and I’d just watched a pair of cowboy movies. “Why not write a western for the contest?” I asked myself. Surely no one else, seeing that artwork, would approach it that way. I wanted the challenge. It was something of a mad leap, but I knew I could do it. The result was “Someplace Cool and Dark,” written over the course of three days, which indeed made it into the anthology. That short story became, in time, the basis for the novel’s penultimate chapter. . . but not for several years.
I was blessed to have had a present and loving father who told me stories. He had a black leatherette folio of his manuscripts. I treasured the nights when he would open it and read me something, ensconced in his recliner, in his green terrycloth bathrobe and pajamas, his cigarette smoldering in his fingers. His tales were of hauntings, Bigfoot, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster—and of the West. Dad, as a young man, owned a horse, Banner. He rode, he read, he dreamed, and he wrote poems about coyotes, life on the trail, cowboys and their singing, rising moons over echoing canyons, chuck wagons, the long trail’s fulfillment and weariness, and about the longing for home. Dad was born in the early 1930s in Illinois—too late to be an 1800s cowboy, and too far east. But a part of him always seemed to live back then, out there.
So as a kid, I heard about cauterizing wounds, about sleeping within a circle of rope to stave off rattlesnakes. I heard about keeping five bullets in a six-shooter so that, during ordinary life, a jostled gun would (hopefully) only land the hammer on an empty chamber.
Stories come to life when they’re meant to. So it was with The Country Under Heaven. I had not intended that first contest story to be anything more than a standalone. But after I’d written several other things, the voice of that same main character began speaking to me. That was weird, because always before it was places that spoke to me before any other story element—whispering trees, a dank and dripping cave, a sleepy town. But I heard this calm, steady voice, this unpretentious, practical-but-philosophical, sincere traveler telling me about himself. He began, “I went to the grave afore I went to the house.” He was born in Illinois, among farmers and fields, just like I was. He was a Union veteran of the Civil War. He was haunted by visions ever since the Battle of Antietam, when an explosion hurled him through the air.
What else could I do but follow him and write down what he spun out? He encountered a vengeful ghost when he visited a friend’s grieving family in Missouri. Then he was on a cattle drive beset by a kind of Lovecraftian horror. Then he ran into another old friend with PTSD who was caring for a pair of unearthly children, and he ran afoul of an outlaw gang.
I now switch to present tense because his accounts have become a story: This person speaking to me, Ovid Vesper, travels through a land still reeling and hurting from the War. His equanimity and kindness make a difference. He brings help and healing where he can. In one of my favorite chapters, “The Good Hour,” Ovid helps a woman cross the threshold out of this life with courage, peace, and assurance.
His saga was written first in a cycle of short stories, which I submitted to various magazines. My queries were met with rejections: Editors often loved the writing, they said, but I had sent them part of a novel, not a story. Aha!—the work needed to be a novel. It was a big story, a long story of the vast and beautiful land that was the West.
I just kept writing. Most westerns, I believe, are elegies. They’re sad, beautiful songs about disappearing ways of life. So much was changing rapidly in that era. Things were being lost that would never return. Injustices were committed. The land was harsh and unforgiving. Illness was rampant. People had bad teeth. Over the years our culture has built up a romantic mythos about the West that we’re now learning to see more accurately, from different perspectives. But even with many inaccuracies and biases cleared away, even with the real ugliness exposed, there was and still is great beauty out there. Personal integrity and goodness go a long way.
I think the western story is what our country has instead of medieval history and fairy lore; the West is the source of our mythology. Of course, there’s a very long history and prehistory to this continent, as well as other mythology, and we need to listen to the voices of those whose ancestors were here for it.
This book was one of the easier ones for me to write. I just got out of Ovid’s way. He was steady, confident, and had a story to tell. That’s something I really wish I’d internalized decades ago as a writer: just listen to the characters.
I generally write novels from a first-person perspective, because that makes the listening easier. I’m not trying to tell the reader about what someone else did; I’m letting the character tell it. This is what happened to me.
An editor at a major publishing house loved the novel, and I really wanted to work with him. He most loved exactly the same parts and aspects of the story that I did. He gave excellent advice, and we wrangled the novel into a much better shape. Unfortunately, in the end, he couldn’t convince his marketing people to come through with an offer. But another editor at a different house made us an offer, and he turned out to be excellent. Melville House is a small but highly respected publisher known for literary fiction—which means it’s pretty miraculous that they wanted to publish a historical fantasy full of monsters, ghosts, other worlds, and shoot-outs. I’m thankful that they also saw some literary merit.
Finally, while we were doing final edits, I had the chance to visit the Antietam Battlefield, to see the landscape Ovid saw, to stand in the exact spot where he was standing when that blast sent him flying. I knelt and pressed both my palms to the earth, quiet on a summer day, Antietam Creek chattering nearby, butterflies dancing in the meadow. I hope Ovid’s book honors the memory of all who fought and died in that terrible and defining time in U.S. history.
For over twenty-five years, Frederic S. Durbin has been professionally writing fiction for adults and children. His novel, A Green and Ancient Light, was named a Reading List Honor Book by the American Library Association.
