TERRENCE HOLT—With IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS

A practicing physician, Terrence E. Holt has written prize-winning stories for publications like TriQuarterly and Zoetrope but has operated, until now, under the literary radar. This collection, which gathers one novella and seven stories written over an entire career, leaps across genres and millennia-from small-town America to the depths of space-exploring the dark corners of human nature in a style that recalls the nineteenth-century American masters and the moral complexity of Conrad. Whether chronicling a plague that ravages a New England town and threatens the human race, an Egyptologist's obsessive quest for a tomb that holds the secrets of immortality, or the anguish of a son who keeps his father's beating heart in a jar, Holt conjures up mysterious worlds in which life joins death in a danse macabre of brilliantly inventive language, wicked wit, and spectacular imagination. A stunning debut by one of our most promising writers.