Released 30th November, 2024 // 246 pages // 978-1-916938-61-8 // RRP: £16.99
An American Book of the Dead: A Wild West Séance is a unique Acid Western set in the mid to late 1800s whose psychedelia stems not from drugs but from the spirit world. When spirit photographer, Ebenezer Elijah Henry is confronted by an enigmatic stranger late one night in his Kansas studio, a peculiar tale is summoned through an impromptu séance that culminates in one of the most arresting photographs ever taken. This is the story of Robert McGee: possible scalping survivor, possible fraud, and how his image was invented by an ambitious photographer already imaging Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
PRAISE for An American Book of the Dead:
A transportive, deeply intelligent and richly unsettling book — a visionary gift.
— China Miéville.
A major arcana of death in America, shot through with bullets, black humour and an assassin-artist’s eye for detail of place and thought. Kirsten Norrie has crafted an ocean-crossing, stricture-defying masterpiece: flamboyant, bloody, piercing, rapturous, brutal, unforgettable.
Everything here - embalmers’ techniques, arcane conjurors’ potions, the flora and fauna of the old West - feels drawn from the life: from ‘freight carts stood like vertebrae’ on a rough plain under the dawn, to its darkest scene, a prose Velázquez painting of a sabbat of Mexicana.
The many deaths in An American Book of the Dead are not trick-scares put there to punctuate the narrative. Mortality here is the centrepiece, death the dark polestar, the relentless attraction of the story: death of the body, of decency, of injustice, set amid the most exceptionally alive descriptions of the fleshy and psychic equipages of life… The taste of planets in snowflakes, the notion of a gap in time between life and death, of time thickening between two minds watching each other, of the tragedies of wolves and men. Stalked by the story of a scalping from the Kansas frontier and weaving her way to a riveting, layered conclusion, Norrie takes exhilarating risk with the novel form. Her characters speak in interruption of each other’s thoughts, which are our thoughts, which are our dreams. This haunted troupe looks up at us: they live burningly towards us, out from this monumental, opulent book of the dead.
— Damian Le Bas
Norrie is a visionary writer, whose extraordinary first novel –– An American Book of the Dead –– draws the reader on an intrepid dance through human history, the dark subject-matter illuminated by an imagination ablaze. Haunted by the voices of Wild West ghosts who eat at your heart, mind and table, An American Book of the Dead drastically revivifies the Western in form and scope.
— Nancy Campbell
ABOUT Kirsten Norrie:
Kirsten Norrie is a writer, artist, and musician who publishes poetry under the name MacGillivray. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the TLS, the Scotsman and on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction and the Verb. In 2024-5 she is the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge and was previously an AHRC Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress and a 2019 recipient of a Fondation Jan Michalski writer residency in Switzerland. The MacGillivray archive is held at the Scottish Poetry Library.
www.kirstennorrie.com
