“Startling monsters and occult oddities abound in this chilling horror Western as a girl journeys across the haunted Montana Territory to rescue her father from an otherworldly creature.”
Available on August 25th from Hyperion Avenue is The Unheld, a horror Western from author Luke Larkin. A supernatural tale on the American frontier, Larkin shared details on the new novel, along with an exclusive excerpt just for Daily Dead readers!
What was the genesis of the idea behind The Unheld?
Luke Larkin: It’s in the title, really. Holding, grasping, touching. I’ve been a little obsessed with the idea of physical, interpersonal touch for a good while, and that’s probably in part because I’m not a touchy or physical person myself. It’s such a loaded thing in our time, especially (and for good reason) after the outbreak of a global pandemic and cascading health crises after, and in digital age when so much interaction is impersonal and intangible. Who do you touch? When? How? Why? To touch another person is to assert to yourself that they are real, present, and consequential. Touch is given and touch is withheld. Touch is enforced and touch is prohibited. What happens then? Things get monstrous, sometimes, I think. The Unheld is a novel about what that does to a person, a place, a time.
Why does this story and its characters mean so much to you?
Luke Larkin: It’s impossible to live here, in Montana, in the West, and not see the open scars of the past bleed into and overlap the opening scars of the present. The displacement, extraction, and violence that built the region is apparent everywhere, simultaneous to its tremendous beauty, and so often those scars intersect and resound in the territory of alienation—a lack, denial, restriction, or refusal to touch and be touched, to feel and be felt. Alienation from place, from history, from culture and heritage, from each other. Alienation enables the violence and begets more of it, and that’s a process still intentionally cultivated today by powers who benefit from it. This novel gets at that, among other things—my own feelings of alienation and how I see it affect myself and the people around me. It warps. It’s horrific.
What horrors await readers when they get their hands on the book this August?
Luke Larkin: The horrors of being known, and of being unknown. And things from the woods with hands. Too many hands, all coming to find you, to know you.
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Official Synopsis: “Startling monsters and occult oddities abound in this chilling horror Western as a girl journeys across the haunted Montana Territory to rescue her father from an otherworldly creature.
Charlie’s life is a lonely one. While other twelve-year-olds are in school, she spends her days skinning the animals her mercurial father hunts in the woods just outside their cabin. And the woods and its twisted creatures—an owl with four wings, a boar with two heads, a fox with gills—are becoming stranger by the day.
One night, a nightmarish beast appears and drags Charlie’s father into the wilderness. To find him, she enlists the aid of two unlikely allies also in search of the beast: an Englishman with a connection to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman exiled for a crime he didn’t commit. Yet as the trio prepare for the confrontation with the beast, Charlie must decide if her father, a brusque man who has always withheld his affection, is ultimately worth saving.
With its blend of Western grit and supernatural menace, The Unheld is an unsettling and atmospheric horror novel about loneliness, human connection, and how we find each other in a world that seems designed to alienate. With this assured debut, Luke Larkin marks his arrival in the genre and proves the American frontier still harbors untapped stories in its shadows.”
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To learn more and pre-order a copy, visit: https://books.disney.com/book/the-unheld/
To read the exclusive excerpt, click on the cover below or visit: https://dailydead.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/The-Unheld-Excerpt_Daily-Dead.docx.pdf
