The plot of this novel is relatively simple. Set in the early 1980s, it follows Travis Stillwell, a lone drifter who kills young women to fill up some void within himself, caused by a broken family and a touch of PTSD. Stillwell meets Rue, a young woman in a honky tonk bar that is more than she seems. After a one night stand with Rue, he wakes up with a deep, strange and insatiable hunger. As he drifts through small towns in the Texas desert, he ends up at the Sundowner Inn, a semi defunct motel/motor lodge run by Annabelle Gaskins, a widow and mother to her ten-year old son Sandy. At the same time, a Texas ranger named John Reader is investigating the murders of young women who frequent honky tonk bars.
The characters are archetypical and accurately drawn. We head hop from Stillwell, whose life is filled with ugly memories of his family life and the Vietnam war to Rue, whose fate is changed with a chance encounter with a mysterious nomad who curses her with murderous hunger, to the more quotidian existence of Gaskins and her son. Davidson’s take on vampirism (never referred to as such in the text, has such verisimilitude that it almost seems natural. Conversely, the author imbues the Texas landscape with a magical quality. In the Valley of the Sun combines languid lyricism with scenes of brutal violence reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s work.
Craig Laurance Gidney 
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