Ireland, R: Beyond the Horizon

In frontier America, a man lives with a pregnant woman who is not his wife. One day a stranger appears and advises the man to formally register the baby as his own at Fort James, a fabled military outpost. Setting out on a lonely journey across an arid and hostile terrain, the man leaves the woman in the care of the stranger. Soon after he departs, the stranger kills the woman and her unborn child and then sets off in pursuit of the man. As their parallel journeys unfold, we learn of the man's childhood as a boy with his father working on a ship where men survived by cannibalizing their crewmates, their internment on an island and their subsequent life in a port town; we watch the stranger as he assumes many guises to shape-shift his way through history in pursuit of the man--a pawn in the stranger's brutal game rewriting the myths of the American West. Menacing, visceral and lyrical, "Beyond the Horizon" is an astonishing allegory about the origins of modern America--a sojourn into the darkest parts of Western lore, which etches out its own unique place in the anti-Western, gothic tradition.