Evening's Empire - Hardcover

Herter, David

3.17

35 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312870345 ISBN 13: 9780312870348

Publisher: Tor Books, 2002

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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.

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Review:

David Herter's debut novel, the SF adventure Ceres Storm, appeared amid a flurry of well-deserved praise. With his second novel, Herter turns to contemporary fantasy in the mode of Gene Wolfe and Charles de Lint.

A composer struggling to create in the wake of tragedy, Russell Kent returns to Evening, the Oregon coast town where his wife fell to her death in the shadow of the founder's mysterious mansion. In Evening, Kent finds new creative energy, the possibility of new romance, and a bizarre secret for which he uncovers impossible, undeniable evidence: Evening is built over the entrance of an ancient, subterranean city--one that may still be inhabited.

Though a sensitive, thoughtful, adult novel, Evening's Empire has something in common with a very different work, Disney's kids-oriented animated movie Atlantis: both are an homage to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and to the whole Victorian-era school of lost- world adventures, a vast genre nowadays nearly forgotten except for Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is regrettable that Herter did not incorporate some of the lost-world adventure's adolescent energy in Evening's Empire. The novel's pace is gentle, the tone muted, and a meandering climax diffuses the tension. --Cynthia Ward

About the Author:

David Herter lives in Seattle, Washington.

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