Luke Larkin’s The Unheld is a horror Western set in the haunted Montana Territory, where twelve-year-old Charlie sets out to rescue her father after a nightmarish creature drags him into the wilderness. Joined by an Englishman connected to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman living in exile, Charlie ventures into a landscape populated by strange creatures and supernatural threats. Blending Western grit with horror, The Unheld explores loneliness, alienation, and the complicated bonds that hold people together.
Larkin is a queer writer living in Big Sky Country, where he received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. The Unheld is his debut novel.
Larkin answered our My Reading Life Q&A about the books and writers that have shaped him as a reader and writer.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Probably Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. My dad would read them to me before bed, before I knew how to read, and when we’d finished the series after so many nights we’d go back and start from the top. In fact, in the early stages of writing The Unheld, I revisited the first Little House book as a sort of anchor. For better or worse, they’re so unmistakably of a time and place, and still so potent and evocative of those times and places.
What book helped you through puberty?
Most every book I read at the time, I’m sure! What sticks in my mind, though, is The Circle of Blood by Alane Ferguson, a mystery novel about the daughter of a coroner. I wanted to be a coroner or mortician for a good while because of that book. I still think I could crack it, but I’m less eager these days.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
This is tough because I’m not sure the really transformative stuff I’ve encountered in my adult life would land with my 16-year-old-self. I’d probably throw more Octavia Butler at him, though. She’s one you should encounter early and often, I think, along with Ursula K. Le Guin.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Again, Le Guin and Butler. Anything Toni Morrison. Annie Dillard, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Steinbeck, Baldwin. Titans of clarity and impact and invention. For more contemporary writers, Debra Magpie Earling, Yaa Gyasi, Jeanette Winterson, Louise Erdrich, Lydia Millet. Too many to list!
These are writers, I know, and not books, but you could take most any work from any of them and find Damn Good Writing.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
True Grit, undoubtedly. I also read through Lonesome Dove and Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series. But I have to be careful about what I read when I’m actively writing—it tends to influence me and it shows on the page, for better or worse, so I try to choose books that champion or demonstrate or complement things I want to accomplish in my own writing. That doesn’t always work, but then, there’s something to be gleaned from every book.
And I’d be remiss not to mention Cheyenne Memories by John Stands in Timber and Margot Liberty, a fabulous and absorbing overview of Northern Cheyenne history and tradition, but also of the region as it appeared at the time.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright. That’s earth-moving poetry right there. Everyone should have it on their nightstand.
The Monkeywrench Gang by Edward Abbey. Pertinent. He writes with no apologies or hostages, for better or worse.
I’m also picking through The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson, about obituaries, and Stiff by Mary Roach, about the many (mis)uses of cadavers. Bedtime stuff!