Evening's Empire by David Herter - Fantasy - SFBookcase.com - Reference of Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels/Authors.

Series: Misc
Genre: Fantasy
ISBN: 0312870345
Pages: 352 pages
Publisher: Tor Books
Price: $24.95
Reader Rating: Not rated

Evening's Empire by David Herter

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 Twenty Thousand 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.