The year is 1797. John Chapman, an impulsive young man and a sexual outlaw, forsaken in the bitter winter of the Allegheny Plateau, clings to his one tenuous dream: to claim a future in an ever-elusive Western outpost. Unarmed and near death, Chapman is on the brink of giving up when an unexpected rescue changes his course in life forever, and he discovers the true meaning of survival.
The mysterious savior is Daniel McQuay, a frontiersman who has already fought to the death to protect his last holdings of ammunition, supplies, and land. He's a loner whose overpowering bond with Chapman is as shifting as a shadow, as dark as the prairie tale he spins for the impressionable young man. He tells of a deranged killer who once roamed the Plateau terrorizing the Senecas, whose torture of their youngest was only the beginning of his crimes, and who disappeared one terrible night into Allegheny legend.
For Chapman, the story clings to his transient soul like a nightmare, tracking him further South along the frozen banks of the Conewango River, and into the safe haven of a gentle Indian woman named Gwennie. His journey also takes him into the intimate deliverance of Palmer, a brash but irresistibly innocent seventeen-year-old settler whose forging of the frontier is a search for his own identity in a vast and inviolate land. Together, Chapman, Palmer, and Gwennie, redoubtable and daring, carve a new life out of the edge of an endless wilderness. But their struggle for a piece of theAmerican Dream becomes more treacherous than the elements as they face the most unpredictable enemy of all -- man -- in a life-and-death struggle that unfolds in the shadow of a legendary and avenging evil.
Weaving an uncommon story of love and loyalty, a vivid rendering of time and place, and a transcendent novel of survival, Michael Jensen moves beyond the boundaries of Western tradition, sweeping the reader into a seductive, primal landscape, where the untamed savagery of the wild intersects with the senses of the mind, the spirit, and the body. Raffish yet lyrical, sensuous and suspenseful, "Frontiers" breaks new ground in its depiction of the power and illogic of human affections, and in its stirring and original evocation of the American West.
