“With his latest, Belardes presents a modern-day western cattle drive through a nightmarish landscape with a dark and bloody history.”
When Tiller offers Greta a job working a cattle drive, she jumps at the chance to actually take a break from the mess going on in her head. Ten days across the Wyoming prairie, three hundred and twenty cows and calves, working with two guys she’s known since her college days, what’s not to love about this job? And yeah, the canyon has a history, sure, but then nature leans to violence, and Greta can accept it, even when it makes her squirm on the inside.
But then Greta doesn’t know the long legacy of murder and ruin that runs in the rocks of this land. As each night passes, the group face ever increasing supernatural dangers: wild animals walking next to dead animals, a ghost train, and evidence of a creature in the skies … a creature that’s supposedly extinct. And Tiller may be hiding even darker secrets from the others. There are only ten sleep left before they reach safety, but Greta soon realizes that may be too long for all of them to survive.
Why we’re excited about this book:
Relatively new to the horror fiction scene, Nicholas Belardes is actually rather well-known in the social media sphere. The author of The Deading, Belardes is also the author of Small Places on Twitter, which was the first piece of twitterature. Belardes’ short fiction has graced the pages of El Porvenir, ¡Ya!, Southwestern American Literature, Pine Reads Review, with non-fiction in such publications as CrimeReads, Boom California, and Nightmare Magazine. With his latest, Belardes presents a modern-day western cattle drive through a nightmarish landscape with a dark and bloody history. Stephen Graham Jones (The Buffalo Hunter Hunter) says: “Open these pages and fall into a cattle drive up in the high lonesome country, where it’s not just the cattle and the work that are challenging—here there be monsters, too.”, and Ai Jiang (Linghun) says: “Ten Sleep is a story suited to be told and read in the belly of a valley by the low light of a fire or on a porch in the evening when the sun is bleeding out. This western and naturalistic multi-perspective novel tackles themes of ecology through memories held within the broken and dead bodies that remain, and is perfect for fans of slow burn, haunting histories that unravel like hidden taxidermy stitches.”
Releasing from Erewhon Books 24 June 2025, Ten Sleep by Nicholas Belardes is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA
