“Although these stories occur in many different parts of the country,” Debra Marquart wrote of one of his books, “they are aesthetically shaped by the landscape of Louisiana, the muddy delta, and the oily bayou—the bottomland to which all things flow.”
“I kept thinking that I wouldn’t mind ending up as a character in one of his stories. Odds are, he’d do me justice.” Dorothy Allison, the New York Times Book Review
“There is magic in a world that still somehow seems devoid of magic.” Publishers Weekly
“Moving easily between blue-collar types and Social Register summer people, New Age dancers and Old World immigrants, underground poets and Elvis freaks, Davis demonstrates an impressive range in this collection.” Kirkus Reviews
“A magical collection of stories, one of the best I’ve encountered in years. It’s hard to convey my enthusiasm for this book—all the ordinary adjectives of praise seem trite and inadequate. But as personal testimony, I can say that I was tremendously moved and enlightened by each story, and that the collection as a whole lingers in my memory like a hometown—a place I once lived in and once loved.” Tim O’Brien
Clouds
Are the Mountains
of the World
Alan Davis
Woodhall Press | Norwalk, CT
Woodhall Press, Norwalk, CT 06855
WoodhallPress.com
Copyright © 2024 Alan Davis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages for review.
Cover design: LJ Mucci
Layout artist: LJ Mucci
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN 978-1-960456-05-2 (paper: alk paper)
ISBN 978-1-960456-06-9 (electronic)
First Edition
Distributed by Independent Publishers Group
(800) 888-4741
Printed in the United States of America
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Advance Comments
“This terrifying and comic novel-in-stories unfolds in the American heartland during a time—not many years hence—when the insurrectionists, militias, and purveyors of fake news have carried the day. Rule of law is a memory. Marauders roam the land, taking and raping at will. People live by their wits, and scruples are a luxury few can afford. The settings here are exotic, dangerous—burned-out towns, desert borderlands, highways that cut through depopulated prairie, communes controlled by sicko zealots, and the isolated forests of the Boundary Waters. The world Davis conjures is an existential horror, and yet his characters manage to find and create humanity and light. Three of them—a grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter—are the heroines whose resilience, love, and stoic humor give this book its narrative power and its shimmering, if tentative, offer of hope. Clouds Are the Mountains of the World is a compelling vision rendered in language, both surreal and chillingly familiar, that summons the apocalyptic dreams of Bruegel and Bosch.”
—Lin Enger, author of American Gospel, Undiscovered Country, The High Divide
***
“What distinguishes Alan Davis’s stark, beautifully written, postapocalyptic Clouds Are the Mountains of the World from other dystopian novels about a world gone to hell is its very ordinariness, its disconcerting banality. While Davis’s vision of a post-Trump world does, indeed, include gun-toting bands of Marauders and Militias, corrupt Police and crazy radio talk-show hosts, a world of racism and economic and political chaos, they merely form the backdrop for humanity’s real scourge—itself. Its selfishness, narcissism, irrational fear, tribalism, and, above all, mindless love of violence. In scene after scene in this novel-in-stories, we see what one of the main characters, Ava, says is the true problem: ‘Hell is other people.’ But the novel avoids cynicism and holds out that the only true hope for humanity is also people. Throughout we see the heroic quest of a family to reunite, despite the social upheaval and the daunting odds against them. Written in sparse, poetic prose, Clouds demonstrates that both our curse and our salvation lie within.”
—Michael C. White, author of Soul Catcher, A Brother’s Blood, and other novels
***
The characters in Alan Davis’s Clouds Are the Mountains of the World are, like many of us, either afflicted by or surviving the impact of two lingering viruses—one of them biological, shared through spit and air, and the other a more insidious, contagious spread of small-minded and fearful ideals that breed violence, ignorance, and distrust. From the inside of a car to the inside of a suburban bubble to the inside of a dive bar, Davis’s Midwesterners grapple with or have adapted, in their unique ways, to these destructive outside forces and carry on in their relentlessly, and sometimes absurdly, human ways that can also, despite their intentions, be beautiful. Nana, one of Mountains’ recurring characters, at one point remembers a friend who died and was buried, and ‘It gave her comfort to imagine blossoms growing out of his skull.’ Davis’s America of the future is like that skull: the remains of what was—and what will never be again. His characters are the blossoms growing out of it.”
—Kris Tsetsi, author of The Age of the Child and Pretty Much True
“Between this earth and that sky I felt erased and blotted out.”
—Willa Cather, My Antonia
***
“You are neither here nor there,
a hurry through which known and
strange things pass.”
—Seamus Heaney
***
Build me a house near to the sea,
Build me a house that looks something like me.
Build me a house close to the water,
Build me a house that safeguards my daughter.
—Ava
To my wife Catherine; to my children Sara and Dillon
(and his wife Gro Jeanett); and to my grandchildren
