EC Dorgan’s The Last Stampede is a surreal, genre-bending literary horror novel about grief, kinship, and reckoning in a dystopian near future. Four Métis strangers find their lives colliding in the aspen country surrounding a prairie city: a dying man haunted by tragedy, a revenge-driven horse woman whose broncos manifest from her arms, a corporate executive desperate to protect his company, and a young woman searching for her place in the world while facing a mysterious illness. When a global tech company begins destroying the natural landscape to replace it with data centres, the connections between the four emerge as they fight for revenge, redemption, and survival.
Dorgan writes weird fiction and horror on Treaty 6 Territory in the Edmonton area. Her work has appeared in The Dark, Augur Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, and numerous anthologies. Named a Writers’ Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2024, she received the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story in 2025. She is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta.
The Last Stampede will be published by House of Anansi on April 27, 2027. It is available for pre-order now.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Last Stampede, designed by Alysia Shewchuk and forthcoming from House of Anansi. Below, Dorgan discusses the vivid image of a horse woman and her broncos that followed her throughout the writing process, the family photographs that helped inspire the design, and how the finished cover blends Western imagery, the Canadian prairie landscape, and the novel’s surreal, dystopian world.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I wasn’t thinking about the cover per se, but I did have vivid images in my mind that were driving my writing process. The image of the “horse woman” with her two broncos really stuck with me, and I knew when the book was finished that I wanted the cover to capture that.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
The team at House of Anansi was great to work with. They had a questionnaire for me to fill out, with prompts to describe the story, meaningful themes, scenes, mood and imagery. I also had the opportunity to share inspiring visuals, and to explain what it was about those elements that resonated with me, whether it was the colours, the typography, the image, the mood, or something else.
At first, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything. But I ended up having the opposite problem. I found tonnes of examples and inspiration. I even attached some old photos that my grandma cut out of the paper from the stampede in her hometown years ago. It was a really fun and creative process.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
It was amazing! When my editor sent me a couple of covers to choose from, I was afraid to open the message. But I didn’t need to worry, all of the covers were gorgeous. I would have been happy with any of them. But one of them stood out to me. I loved everything about it—the broncos, the Western typography, the expanse, the colours. I knew it was perfect for The Last Stampede!
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
There’s a Western vibe, with the typography and the woman dressed like a cowboy. A sense of expanse with that orange backdrop that could also be a dystopian sky. The green and yellow background hint at nature, maybe pollen, and canola fields. Vivid colours like the pink and red around the horses speak to the story’s surreal elements and convey a sense of movement and dramatic flair. Most importantly, we have the two horses coming out of the woman’s forearms—the broncos at the very heart of the story.