Sacrificial Animals

At the behest of his abusive father, Carlyle, Nick Morrow has been called home to Stag’s Crossing, a broken place he thought he escaped long ago. Carlyle is dying, and he has tasked Nick with bringing home Joshua, his older brother, who was disowned after marrying Emilia, a woman of Chinese descent. Nick’s infatuation with Emilia and the anger and bitterness at the heart of the Morrow family might prove to be the family’s undoing. Though Pedersen’s debut takes place in rural Nebraska and features Chinese mythology and supernatural horror, it evokes the Southern gothic, with the flat Nebraska landscape, the entwined toxic relationships, and the characters’ simmering emotions all contributing to an oppressive atmosphere. These emotions are skillfully portrayed by narrator Yung-I Chang, who navigates seamlessly from Nick’s reedy intellectual tone to Carlyle’s angry growl. Readers of tragedies may suspect that Nick and his family are headed for a spectacular fall, but Pedersen seeds the story with subtle foreshadowing so that the conclusion feels more like karma and less like a random assault by supernatural forces.