Coming soon from Eden Emiko Hall

River of Horses is a work of literary fiction about death, grief, friendship, love, family, the bond between humans and horses, and the price of progress and modernity. It presents us with a world where ghosts are real, and eternities can change, where horses are celebrated as characters who live well beyond the page, and life cannot help but go on.

‍ “When the rats robbed me blind, I blamed them for all the cruel uncertainty in life. I continued to blame them for my fall, for the danger and hell that immediately followed the fateful night when my life intersected theirs. But that was foolish. I was foolish. Survival casts no shadow. It offers no apologies, and I may as well have blamed the sun for setting.” ‍

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When I was eight, I wrote a story. In the very first lines, the reader is dropped into the grave of a girl named Alice. She is stirring and waking. She discovers that she is dead; there are ants, worms, rot. She opens the doors of her front teeth; they swing heavily on the hinges of her desire to live again. Alice steps out of the grave and into adventures that stemmed from my eight-year-old imagination. I honestly don’t remember what those adventures were, but it was a good story, of that I’m certain.

That story drew attention to the places in my mind that created it, shaped it, and released it. Those places weren’t ready for attention. Are they ever? You are a writer, they said. Write. I was eight. What did I know about being a writer? I wrote anyway.

My life has been like a sandpainting in a shot glass. I don’t understand how those layers of colors and shapes formed, but they did. They are the rich, raw, beautiful, and sometimes frightening landscape that formed like geology under pressure and heat. They are the painting in which Alice has never stopped telling me stories, and I have never stopped writing them down. Yes, writers write. But writers also live. Stories can live inside us for eternity, but they become something else entirely when they are shared. Now is the time for sharing.

“I woke because the train sounded desperate. The whistle that had torn Henry and me apart now screamed frantically into the thin air of Nevada’s dusky high desert. Outside the train’s harsh fluorescents, the blood of the dying sun clung to sparse grass. The train screamed again. I bolted from my seat and wobbled to the fishbowl observation car where that soft light had stowed away on the faces of the passengers, the seatbacks, and tables. Through the window, the rangeland stood still, as if it was holding its breath until the train passed, until night fell and concealed its wonder from our prying eyes.”