Queer Southern Gothic horror · Novella
What the Land Takes
A short, brutal book about the places that promise safety in exchange for disappearance.
5.5 x 8.5 in · Cover and interior line drawings by MK Trahan
Publishes April 7, 2027. Audiobook narrated by Aaron Sills, $14.99.
Caleb runs from love because love makes him visible, and visible is dangerous where he comes from. The road takes him to a farm in the hills, to a man named Dalton, and to a bargain the land has been making with people like him for a very long time.
The deal is simple. Give up your voice and the land will keep you. Caleb submits, and the submission goes further than he imagined, until he is kept the way livestock is kept. Then someone comes looking for him, and love is tested against the one thing the land demands: silence.
“Libraries and readers seeking gay novels that are more than a cut above the usual approach … will find all these elements of attraction and more in What the Land Takes.”
D. Donovan, Midwest Book Review
Advance review
D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review, and Editor, Donovan's Literary Services. February 2027 issue.
In What the Land Takes, Caleb desperately searches for peace after a love gone wrong, finding it initially in a remote farm owned by Dalton, who offers him something he treasures. Peace comes with a price tag that may prove too big for him to pay, however, as the plot creates a powerful contrast between two personalities and their desires.
The story opens with Caleb’s gripping review of his life’s progression, after he spent “six months in the gaps” of a country that “swallows him whole.” In the Cincinnati world of his past romantic encounters, touch was “a negotiation.” Here, it’s the beginning of something new, born of old attractions and possibilities that he seeks to remake in a new life.
Stranger Dalton Prewitt, who sparks an instant attraction, offers him something different:
“You gotta know that what I got to offer ain’t like what you’re used to.”
“What am I used to?”
“Things that talk,” he said. “People playing dress-up. Pretending they ain’t meat.”
Through these opening encounters, the raw immediacy of Cager Klarxon’s descriptive voice comes to life as the two men dance around possibilities that embrace secrets, lies, uncomfortable truths, and dangerous past precedents.
The story moves back in time to explore some of the experiences that have made Caleb gun-shy and led him to want to disappear so thoroughly, even though he can no more ignore his nature than truly change it.
His flight from what he experienced presents some of the gritty rationales for starting anew that are classic Klarxon explorations of gay relationships:
I was going to a place where no one was like us. I was going to a place where I could stop trying to be a person. Where I could stop flinching every time someone laughed too loud.
“What’s in Kentucky?” he had asked me once.
“Dirt,” I whispered to the empty car. “And silence.”
I wanted to be buried.
Readers interested in novels that sizzle not just with passion, but stark understanding of relationship and social entanglements and the costs of starting over in an alien environment will find What the Land Takes unusually powerful and compelling.
Different men, including Eric and other personalities, are attracted to Caleb because he “touches things that are real” and stands out from the crowd of clones seeking to be unique, albeit ironically in the same way.
Parties, apps, and cultural trappings of connection that prove to be alienating forces contrast with Caleb, Ian, and Dalton’s choices as they move towards and away from one another, creating a story well beyond the usual gay novel of passion to probe identity, loss, and discovery.
The result is a compelling saga of getting lost and found again, rural and urban contrasts in relationship development, and the lure of quiet places that bring with them grief, regret, and healing. The finished edition features cover art and original interior line drawings by MK Trahan of Miasmatik Art.
Libraries and readers seeking gay novels that are more than a cut above the usual approach and which read like the sophisticated dance between men that made Brokeback Mountain such a compelling force of nature and love will find all these elements of attraction and more in What the Land Takes.