Seven Devils

Haxan is a place of ferocity and death. U.S. Marshal John Marwood must rescue the daughter of a woman tied darkly to his past. Zamora is just like Marwood: violent, uncompromising, and eternal. She is hidden deep within the Indian Nations in a place of dark magic and timeless eternity called Seven Devils. There, Marwood will face his past and present, and find at last the only woman he has ever loved throughout time.

Publishers Weekly

“After 2014’s brilliantly brutal Haxan, [in Quaternity] Hoover revisits his nightmarish American West, a blood-soaked wasteland where ‘land belongs to the man strong enough to take it, and keep it.’. . . Readers seeking a simple horse opera should look elsewhere; the depth of Hoover’s narrative hews far closer to the moral complexities of Cormac McCarthy than it does the straightforward adventures of Louis L’Amour. A western of blood and violence with a marked lack of redemption tinged with hints of the fantastic, this is a pitch-black western that resonates.”

Richard Parks, author of Yamada Monogatari: To Break the Demon Gate

“The Old West wasn’t all darkness and murder, unless your name is John Marwood, a man, by his own assessment, ‘with a demon coiled like a watch spring in his marrow.’ Simply put―He is a killer. Yet that isn’t the half of him, and his true nature and his destiny alike remain a secret even to himself. Kenneth Mark Hoover tells the story of an immortal champion in an American West that never was, and so is all the truer for it.”

Michael Merriam, author of Last Car to Annwn Station and The Horror at Cold Springs

“With Quaternity, Hoover paints a sparse and unflinching landscape, taking the reader down the dark trail his protagonist John Marwood rides while seeking what is lost and unremembered. As the gnawing hunger in his soul drives Marwood toward his ultimate destiny, the west as it was unfurls before the reader under Hoover’s steady hand. If you love realistic westerns and dark fantasy, this is the book for you!”

Melissa Lenhardt, author of Stillwater

“With a voice both sparse and poetic, Hoover takes on the hoary cliches of Western fiction and dismantles them one by one. In Quaternity, Hoover’s unflinching look at evil will challenge everything you know about yourself and the world we live in.”

Jennifer Brozek, author of Apocalypse Girl Dreaming and Never Let Me Sleep

“Hoover does it again. Quaternity starts with a bang and doesn’t quit until a satisfying conclusion. This is my kind of weird west. Love it!”

Melia McClure, author of The Delphi Room

“In Quaternity, his second outing in the richly evocative Haxan series, Kenneth Mark Hoover once again plunges us headlong into the bloody-minded fury of the Old West, mixing the raw violence of time and place with the eerie tenderness of a fantastical fever dream to gripping, visceral effect.”

Amy Raby, author of Assassin’s Gambit and The Fire Seer

“Kenneth Mark Hoover’s vivid prose delivers an unflinching look at the violent horrors and the stark beauty of the Old West.”

Gemma Files, author of the Hexslinger series, We Will All Go Down Together, and Experimental Film

“Twice as vicious as its predecessor, Quaternity is operatically mythological, a poetic, doom-laden Western soaked in blood and frenzy. This Cormac McCarthyesque terror fantasia of a prequel both frames and outstrips Hoover’s Haxan, lending it the perfect amount of context, as Hoover’s literally eternal protagonist Marshall John Marwood excavates his past in order to accept his future. Driven by philosophical musings both monstrous and humane, Marwood tracks an interlocking chain of massacres towards a lost city founded on ‘the long blood of violence,’ the same dark current underlying almost everything in Hoover’s lawless, ultra-violent frontier . . . yet certain spots of brightness still occur here and there, inevitable collisions between fate and free will, love and justice. This is a hard book to read, but you’ll savour its bitter aftertaste.”

About the Author

Kenneth Mark Hoover is a professional writer living in Dallas, TX. He has sold over 60 short stories and is a member of SFWA and HWA. His fiction has appeared in BENEATH CEASELESS SKIES, ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, STRANGE HORIZONS, and many others. He has two previous Haxan novels out: Haxan and Quaternity. Seven Devils is the third in the Haxan universe, and will be released in early 2020. You can read more at Kennethmarkhoover.com.

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