Evening's Empire [Hardcover]

David Herter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2002

David Herter's first novel, Ceres Storm, was recently published to widespread acclaim. "Distinctive and imaginative, Herter's tale moves to its own disconcerting logic: a debut of immense promise," said Kirkus Reviews. Now Herter moves from SF to contemporary fantasy and to a more literary mode of storytelling.

Evening's Empire is set on the Oregon coast, in Evening, a small town famous for its cheeses. Russell Kent, an opera composer from Massachusetts, lost his beloved wife there a year ago to a freak accident, and returns now to confront his ghosts.

Kent has been commissioned to write an opera based upon Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, whose story fills his dreams, and only in Evening does he feel himself able to return to work. There he also discovers many strange things (even beyond the cheese sculptures), finds new love and new friendship, and is initiated into a fantastic secret the whole populace is hiding in a cavern beneath the town.

In some ways reminiscent of the Newford stories of Charles de Lint, this is an ambitious fantasy by an important new talent from the Pacific Northwest.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

David Herter's debut novel, the SF adventure Ceres Storm, appeared amid a flurry of well-deserved praise. With his second novel, Herter turns to contemporary fantasy in the mode of Gene Wolfe and Charles de Lint.

A composer struggling to create in the wake of tragedy, Russell Kent returns to Evening, the Oregon coast town where his wife fell to her death in the shadow of the founder's mysterious mansion. In Evening, Kent finds new creative energy, the possibility of new romance, and a bizarre secret for which he uncovers impossible, undeniable evidence: Evening is built over the entrance of an ancient, subterranean city--one that may still be inhabited.

Though a sensitive, thoughtful, adult novel, Evening's Empire has something in common with a very different work, Disney's kids-oriented animated movie Atlantis: both are an homage to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and to the whole Victorian-era school of lost- world adventures, a vast genre nowadays nearly forgotten except for Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is regrettable that Herter did not incorporate some of the lost-world adventure's adolescent energy in Evening's Empire. The novel's pace is gentle, the tone muted, and a meandering climax diffuses the tension. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

This contemporary riff on Jules Verne, a departure from Herter's well-received SF debut, Ceres Storm (2000), exhibits the same fine storytelling but, sorry to say, closes on a false note. A few years after his wife fell to her death from a cliff in Empire, Ore., Russell Kent returns to the quiet coastal village to compose an opera about Verne's Captain Nemo. Dreams of his dead wife soon trouble Russell's sleep, as do dreams of the town itself strangely altered. He begins an affair with his alluring landlady and gets acquainted with the locals, all the time sensing that everyone in Empire shares a secret. People who otherwise might seem merely eccentric, or behavior that might just be amusing, such as the town's general obsession with the varieties of cheese produced there, become more and more uncanny. The author does an excellent job of presenting everyday events in a slightly odd light. Russell gradually catches on that the folks of Empire believe that they're on the verge of literally unearthing something wonderful. Herter cranks up the suspense, amid increasingly bizarre but still vivid and convincing characters and settings. Unfortunately, the plot unravels in its last pages in a snarl of unexplained revelations and rushed action. While the novel's promotional copy compares it with Gene Wolfe's Peace and Charles de Lint's Newford stories, the cop-out ending is not one either of those pros would have chosen. But all the good writing that goes before suggests that Herter should gain the necessary mastery of his craft in due course.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312870345
• ISBN-13: 978-0312870348
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,337,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Herter is an American author. His first novel was Ceres Storm in 2000, which was chosen as one of the top 10 science fiction books of 2000 by Amazon.com, followed by Evening's Empire in 2002.

In 2004 he spent a month in the Czech Repubic, an experience that led to his Czech trilogy,On the Overgrown Path (2006), The Luminous Depths (2008), and One Who Disappeared (2012). Says Stephen Baxter, "[Herter's trilogy] has a richness of prose and a density of allusion and ideas reminiscent of authors like Aldiss and Wolfe -- and, incidentally, it is a page-turning cracker of a horror story. Outside his homeland, Karel Capek may be remembered primarily through his legacy of the term "Robot". It is Herter's achievement in this novella to lead us through the narrow window of that single chthonic word to a rich evocation of a fragile, doomed period of Central European history"

October Dark (2011) is a fantasia on Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, telling a secret history of the fantastic film, centering on special-effects wizard Willis O'Brien's 1931 encounter with a magician whose career stretches back to the birth of the phantasmagoria in Post-Revolutionary France.

Library Journal, in their starred review, called October Dark "a delight." Macabre Republic chose it as their #1 Halloween Vector in 2011, saying "Herter's genius here lies in never becoming merely derivative while paying serious homage to Something Wicked. He gifts readers with original riffs on iconic Bradbury scenes, from the attack by a witch in a black balloon to a perilous descent beneath the city streets by Will and Jim. A paean to the childlike sense of wonder, October Dark is itself wonderfully imaginative."
Herter lives in Seattle, Washington.

Early in 2012 the epic conclusion to his Czech trilogy, One Who Disappeared, was published. Says Brian Stableford, "David Herter's trilogy, to which One Who Disappeared provides a spectacular and moving conclusion, does not fall; on the contrary, it remains perfectly suspended, sturdy and elegant -- and by virtue of its topography, it does not, like more myopic literary projects, taper off into soothing closure, but opens wide to an even vaster and more glorious universe of possibility."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very, Very Good, July 30, 2002

By 

Elizabeth Delafield (Boalsburg, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Evening's Empire (Hardcover)

I read this book in the space of three days. I felt that it was well written, and highly entertaining. My only complaint was that I feel I missed something with the ending, but that could be a result of having read it so quickly. I felt Mr. Herter tackled a very interesting concept, which has been used before, in a manner that was quite unique. I highly recommend this book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing -- Very highly recommended, July 6, 2002

By 

C. Penn "WordWeaving" (Greenville, SC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evening's Empire (Hardcover)

Two years after his wife falls to her death in a bizarre accident, music composer Russell Kent returns to the town of Evening, a small town set on the Oregon coast. Nightmares and lack of creative energy have drawn him back in the hopes of getting closure to his loss. From a room at the local bed and breakfast, Russ hopes to write an opera based on Jules Verne's TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.

As his heart heals, Russ finds love and friendship in the town of evening. His creative energies recaptured, he begins satisfying work on his opera, the echoes of the music in head matching the mystical elements created of sun, sea, and secrets. For soon he learns of the town's secret, an empire hidden under the hill that will change his world.

Author David Herter combines contemporary fantasy with a literary form of story telling to pen a haunting, lyrical tale in EVENING'S EMPIRE. The echoes and subtle nuances drawn from literature and music result a surreal sense of the unexpected that subtly draws the reader into a tale as odd in the telling as in the content. Yet the rhythms and interweavings are almost magical in their allure, making it impossible to put the book down. At once riveting and bizarre, readers will find their imaginations taking flight with EVENING'S EMPIRE. Very highly recommended.

5.0 out of 5 stars Color of sound, December 9, 2003

By 

R. Perelmutter "draig_du" (Lawrence, KS) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evening's Empire (Hardcover)

If you have read the other reviews you already know that "Evening's Empire" has a disappointing end. There is a masterful slow, chilling buildup of tension, which in the last chapters is inexplicably diffused without a real closure or resolution.

If it was any other book, it would have mattered more.

This book is unique in that it evokes not only pictures, but sounds. The hero, Russel Kent, is a composer, a synesthete who perceives all sound as color. He is comissioned to write an opera based on Jules Verne's "2000 leagues under the sea"; he composes sketches of music haunted by dreams of death and memory. Kent's opera is born in front of our eyes out of the dark secrets of the sea and the fear that lives in small towns on the coast; it is born out of storms and tremors of the earth. It speaks of drowning, and of people who walk under the water, of strange cities abandoned yet active under the pressure of water and ground. It is the music dreams are made of, and nightmares. I know very little about musical theory; yet this book was for me a unique experience of music in greens, blues and greys.

I found most of the fantasy elements in this book redundant, added as if an afterthought to the plot. The written musical pieces never come together as a complete oeuvre, and neither does the book. The opera project is put on hold. Only some of the score is written.

In real life, I guess, we rarely hear about such abandoned projects, even if they are works of genius. Herter lets us listen to Kent's unfinished masterpiece. It may sound strange, but I hope that in Herter's imaginary world, the project is someday completed. I wish I could see this opera performed; I guess I'll console myself with Reimann's Lear.