ThisNewDark Format: TradePaperback

True Grit meets Twin Peaks in this genre-bending debut novel by Chase Dearinger. This New Dark explores the haunted, broken hills of Eastern Oklahoma, where over the course of just two cold days in November, the residents of Seven Suns will each face their own kind of weird. There’ s Wyatt, a dope-growing Muscogee whose obsession with a black cougar that shouldn’ t exist begins to uproot his life. The teenager who lives with him— Randy— is outraged at the world, confused about his sexuality, and haunted by the bones of his mother. And there’ s Esther— a dutiful, God-fearing court bailiff who finds herself thrust into the position of county sheriff, forced to find the missing girl whose disappearance sets everything in motion. Inexorably bringing them all together is a nameless cowboy junky who may or may not be some ancient shape-shifting evil. All of them must overcome this new dark while dealing with the violent undercurrents of family, religion, addiction, and death.

Chase Dearinger is an Oklahoma native who now lives in Kansas with his wife and two daughters. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in magazines around the country, including Bayou, The Southampton Review, Short Story America, and Heavy Feather Review. He currently serves as the Chief Editor of Emerald City, a quarterly online fiction magazine, and directs the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize, an annual poetry chapbook contest. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Pittsburg State University. This New Dark is his first novel.