Observer by Nicholas Russell
HarperCollins, 2026 (pre-order)
ISBN-13: 978-0063452398
Available: Hardcover, Audiobook, Kindle, MP3CD
Buy: Bookshop.org
A threatening landscape, the arrival of all of a mother’s worldly goods without explanation, and the mysterious world of a suddenly closed Nevada observatory, set the stage for this debut novel.
Observeropens in a canyon where signs of life are vanishing as the inanimate remnants anticipate the return of a “flying creature” that might be responsible and is now lying in wait to end “you.” From this strange start, the story quickly transitions to Renata and the two family members with whom she lives. Renata struggles to find out about the mother she barely knew, a woman who seems to have chosen a career in science over having a daughter, and quickly realizes that the desert her mother studied is not the empty place one might imagine. Their past and current interactions and how they are now responding to what they assume is the death of Renata’s mother, Corinne, are complicated and suggest that each person has unrevealed and unresolved feelings about their family and about Corinne.
As Renata reads from a journal about her mother’s work in the desert, she is fascinated by connections to a diary written in the early twentieth century by a surveyor whose notes have similarities to those written by her mother. This propels Renata into a journey through what becomes, simultaneously, a dream-memory landscape and a desert death-nightmare. Time and human contact seem less real and the hidden life of the desert more real.
Nicholas Russell’s writing is infused with mystery and is, at times, phantasmagoric– which corresponds to Renata’s experience of her mother as a type of mirage. This image contrasts the experiences of the surveyor with her mother’s scientific account while casting doubt on the science. Francis Brown’s diary records how he “witnessed visitations” and “experienced them.” He did not view them as “encounters with the devil” but “failures of the rational mind to comprehend its surroundings with any reliability or discernment.” Brown concludes, “We imagine monsters” but “what frightens me is not their existence, but our fatal sensory impotence.”
While Brown opines a human lack of awareness, Russell recognizes where horror comes from and draws us slowly to it, all the while making us wonder when it will rear its supernatural head. This promising novelist’s work conjures a Western Gothic feel through prose that sketches the recognizable yet odd characters and delineates the menacing setting in that disquieting way you can’t quite put your finger on. What will Russell do next? Whatever it is, hopefully it’s soon!
Reviewed by Nova Hadley
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