This Here Is Devil's Work: A Novel

In this edgy and dramatic adventure story, modern-day wildlands firefighters and cattle rustlers struggle for both physical and emotional survival in a changing Western landscape. Braiding the stories of firefighters Morgan and Jeremy and a grandmother laundromat custodian-turned cattle rustler, Jacklynn, This Here is Devil's Work is a fiery ride through small towns of Nevada and Montana and the rugged expanse that connects them.

With twelve years on the fireline, Morgan, a wildland firefighter with a wandering eye, believes he knows what his teenage half-brother, Jeremy, needs to do to shrug off boyhood: spend a single fire season punching line to earn money for auto mechanic school. But when Jeremy joins the Ruby Mountain Hotshots and earns the respect and admiration of their fire boss, Bailey, an unresolved animosity toward his kid brother threatens to destroy everything.

Life hasn't been easy on Jacklynn. She's got her heart set on finding a way to move from the small town in Montana where she's lived her whole life to reunite with her daughter and grandson in Tucson. She wants to make up for a lifetime of missteps by protecting the boy and making sure her daughter stays on the straight and narrow. On the same day that a stranger, Lenny, waltzes into her life and ignites that old feeling, an opportunity for life-changing money presents itself in the form of a dozen pregnant heifers. The only trouble is, they aren't hers-not yet, anyway.

Morgan and Jacklynn's paths cross when lightning ignites a blaze in the untamed Montana forest and their choices force each other into the crucible.

Inspired by the wildfires raging across the West and the legendary smokejumpers whose legacy continues to shape the ways wildland fires are fought, 'This Here is Devil's Work' explores how love and loneliness and can sour, inspiring desperate and self-destructive acts. Curtis Vickers pulls no punches in showing us how guilt, isolation, and desperation really feel-and how such emotions can drive the actions of all of us, even people we might, from a distance, consider heroic. An incendiary debut, this novel will appeal to readers in a New West literary movement-less dependent on protagonists who are either noble or praiseworthy, or noble but conflicted.

About the Author :
Curtis Bradley Vickers's short fiction and essays have been published by Sou'wester, Ohioana Quarterly, Shroud, Muscle & Blood, and GWS Press. From the first wildfire he experienced as a child fishing on the Mogollon Rim to the first time the Bonneville Salt Flats cracked beneath his feet, he has always wanted to pin to the page the West that filled his imagination. This Here is Devil's Work is Vickers's first novel. He lives in Reno, NV.

Review :
This Here is Devil's Work is a vivid and evocative reminder that, here in the vastness of the American West, our personal stories and the stories of the land remain intertwined and inseparable."" - Michael P. Branch, author of Rants from the Hill and How to Cuss in Western 

""In Curtis Vickers' This Here is Devil's Work, the archetypes of the American West get a much-needed update. The twining storylines of a grandmother-turned-cattle rustler and a bitter wildland firefighter capture with frightening clarity and empathy what desperation will drive people to. This is the West that I know; full of dangerous lands and dangerous loves, where characters are either forged or consumed in the flames of a raging wildfire."" - Gabriel Urza, author of The White Death: An Illusion and All That Followed
 
""Tautly crafted and breathtakingly suspenseful, this debut novel will leave you forever changed."" - Christopher Coake, author of You Would Have Told Me Not To
 
""This Here Is Devil's Work echoes the images of wildfires seen on the nightly news. This timely novel explores the subject matter and themes of stewardship and control, and many readers will be impacted by the difficult contradictions exposed within these pages."" - Markus Egeler Jones, author of How the Butcher Bird Finds Her Voice

""Curtis Vickers forges unflinchingly into the fiery hearts of his characters and shelters us from the showering sparks produced by their conflagrations. Montana and its people have rarely burned as brightly as they do in this vivid, finely crafted, page-turner of a novel."" - SiÂn Griffiths, author of Scrapple, Borrowed Horses, and The Heart Keeps Faulty Time