Ten Sleep

Greta Molina takes what looks like an easy, well-paid job: a ten-day cattle drive across the Wyoming prairie to the ranching town of Ten Sleep. She will ride an ATV alongside 320 cows and calves, with two men she has known since college, and the long days should give her room to untangle her own troubles. Her old friend Tiller set up the work, and she has no reason to doubt it.

The land has other plans. Murder and decay are buried deep in its rock, and every night on the prairie brings a new threat to Greta and her companions. A ghost train of the damned rolls through. Wild animals move side by side with dead ones. Signs point to an enormous creature in the sky, something that is supposed to have been extinct for ages.

The farther they travel, the more it seems Tiller is keeping darker secrets of his own. Safety lies ten sleeps away, but Greta begins to fear that is too long for any of them to last.

Ten Sleep is a weird Western horror novel by Nicholas Belardes, with a young Mexican American woman at its center. It is pitched at readers of Nick Cutter's Little Heaven, Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy and Catriona Ward's Sundial.